We Couldn't Know

by Alex Carnevale

It was, improbably, the 1990s. It was not quite the 1990s, and then it became the 1990s. I wrote down the year at the top of my paper that first day of the new decade. We were not entirely assured it was a new decade, but the evidence pointed that way.

The day my house got Prodigy, I went online. "What is this world?" I thought. The AOL chatrooms were another place to go in the world in which you lived.

I grew up, but the world didn't grow up.

In 1996, I read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, about people starting a new tech company. They could not conceive of how many people the Web would one day employ for no real reason.

These were years of utter happiness when viewed in retrospect. On my first day of high school economics, I marveled at a pie chart showing exactly what kind of nation we were. How a nation subsist when it consisted almost entirely of a service economy?

"How can it work?" I recalled asking, "when it doesn't make anything. When it doesn't do anything?"

There was one sketch on Friends that reminded me of this. After a group meal, the friendlies decide to split the bill six ways. "But you have more money than us," Phoebe whined on behalf of herself, Rachel and Joey, perhaps not understanding she'd be starring in a web series about fifteen years later.

Joey was a struggling actor who became a successful soap opera star.

Monica was a waiter-caterer-chef.

Chandler was an account.

Ross was a paleontologist.

Rachel had no job skills, and went to work in fashion.

Phoebe was a psychic/folk singer/masseuse.

This country now has too many accredited colleges and universities to count, few of which teach any marketable job skills. Many have argued, including myself, that not every person needs a university education: to live in a small room with other confused young people, and share sexual diseases.

Now there is considerable question as to whether we even need universities. Perhaps the wealthy will continue sending their children there, and perhaps inexpensive state schools with massive federal support and huge endowments that don't have to show actual results will benefit. Terrific.

America's system of higher education is pathetic and outmoded. In European countries the educational system is designed for more flexibility and more specialization. It has proven itself a superior approach. Why on Earth would you think everyone requires the same education?

This prolonged adolescence is an undeniable feature of American life. People live longer, so they might have well have multiple financial dependents. Chandler wasted time with Janice - he should have checked her credit history. Ross got married and divorced so many times the loss of income became a cry for attention.

The America I knew is dead. We have no job skills, thus we have no job security. We have South Park, but The Office is unwatchable. I can't watch people make and sell paper, not in these times.  The 1990s are the good old days, and they'll never come again. We couldn't know.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Le Travail" - The Work (mp3)

"Do It" - The Work (mp3)

"Brickyard" - The Work (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

A Man Is Whatever Room He Is In

Mad Men Made Mad Ads At Mad Mag

We Have To Get You A New Daddy

It Was A Very Good Year

by KARINA WOLF

1984 was a great year for pop songs and pop stars. That summer, I fell off a hammock and spent three months in a brace that enforced good trapezius alignment and kept me out of the swimming pool. I remember sitting by the lifeguard and listening to the hits from his tinny mono-speaker: When Doves Cry, What’s Love Got To Do With It, and Like A Virgin.

The 80s remind you that popular kids do not become rock heroes; the stars are the freaks with ADD and megalomania. There is an appalling, appealing absurdity to many of the films of that period, especially those starring Prince, Madonna or Tina Turner.

Watching Purple Rain, it is inconceivable that such a shoddy script would become a film today (even 50 Cent got an art-house director to hone his acting debut). Luckily, someone recognized that the performance of a “dwarf dipped in a bucket of pubic hair” (as Boy George once called Prince) was better than a plausible story or skilled acting. The energy and ease of the Artist’s on-stage antics—when dancing he’s a mashup of Gene Kelly and James Brown—and the New Romantic couture are so mesmerizing that you overlook the dialogue and wooden performances.

Literal-mindedness is petty; in Purple Rain, we get a touch of biographical conflict and broad strokes of the voyeuristic sexuality and personal whimsy from which the young Prince tailored his musical catalog. He’s self-pitying to the point of self-destruction. He collects antique dolls, practices ventriloquism, and listens to fetishistic recordings of women crying while living in a basement apartment straight out of Silence of the Lambs. Can you imagine this in a Justin Timberlake biopic?

"Strollin'" - Prince (mp3)

"Willing and Able" - Prince (mp3)

"Walk Don't Walk" - Prince (mp3)

Rock stars are always our exotic other, even if they come from the next town. These films are their creation myths, forging their beginnings and crowning them star entertainers. None of these flicks will be remembered for their stories but that’s not the only enjoyment of cinema.

Desperately Seeking Susan is a kind of cinema verite: it’s entirely believable that young Madonna has just climbed out of a garbage dump (or a gangster’s Atlantic City hotel room), bathed in a Port Authority sink and picked up her clothes at Love Saves the Day. Madonna’s early successes weren’t about her refinement as an aesthete or a provocateur; she was a slightly attractive, slightly repellant girl from the Midwest.

There’s something about Desperately Seeking Susan that resonates with edgier New York stories like Taxi Driver or After Hours. Maybe it’s the examination of the erotic gaze—Susan is a parasite and a touchstone, which is why so many characters in the film put up with her. Her life’s is a mess but she isn’t. Maybe that’s why Madonna convinces in the role: for Susan (as for Ms. Ciccone) self-preservation always comes first.

Mad Max is a giant cabaret canvas for the Anna Mae Bullock variety show. This is pre-Oprah Tina Turner and she sports a Grace Jones snear, a lion’s mane of synthetic hair and killer legs. Does anyone remember anything about this film besides her bizarre get-ups?

Tina Turner had already survived the crucible of fame; the mid-80s were her moment to re-emerge as liberated woman, and her Aunty Entity has an edginess that matches the singer’s life and times. In it, Tina’s smile is megawatt but self-regarding. I’d argue that the best stars are only half engaged with their audience, because, like a child playing dress up, most of the fun comes from the conviction of the fantasy. This Tina wears a chain-mail minidress, Fred Flintstone shankbone earrings and stilettos—in the desert!

No audience will be fooled that these films are about their fictional entities. The pleasure of watching is getting to spend time with the stars—arguably the last time that Prince or Madonna offered an unguarded view of self. The wobbly performances are like the Natalie Portman scenes in Closer—seemingly a coincidence if a convincing line was caught on camera. But it’s the lack of skill that reifies the star. As Zizek says about the unmasked Wizard of Oz, "There is something more real in the illusion than in the reality behind it."

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and her tumblr is here.

TR legend Wolf in the flesh

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Women of the year.

The swimming pool.

Creeley at Cedar Bar.

Me and Giant Drag

by Georgia Hardstark

It was a fourteen day festival tour through Europe. We were asked to come along for company, for adventure's sake, for merch-table manning...I don't really know. Both Annie and Micah had been friends of mine for years, so when they asked us ("us" being my boyfriend of 4 years and myself) a month before the departure date, to come along, we didn't hesitate before accepting.

I met Annie my sophomore year of high school.  She was a year younger than me, this tiny little thing with the biggest mouth and a disturbed sense of humor.  We both moved to Los Angeles after high school, and she and I became inseparable to the point that we couldn't go anywhere social by ourselves without being asked where the other one was.

While I meandered through my early 20s, not really knowing what I wanted to make of myself, Annie was already aware that she belonged on a stage, and that she was born to entertain people. I've watched home movies she made as a kid, an only child whose loneliness emanates from the camera, despite the fact that she's laughingly miming along to a Beatles song blaring from the radio, or diving face-first into a pile of pillows she's stacked on the couch.

I took up smoking in the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" tradition.

I ate pre-packaged sandwiches from French gas stations and bought more Kinder Surprise eggs than one would think possible.

I spent an hour in an abandoned graveyard in a small English town, reading the fading headstones and thinking about the influenza pandemic of 1918.

I was in Germany the night the German soccer team beat Portugal in the World Cup, and the celebration in the little town where our hotel was located was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

Each city we stopped in, each rural town where a huge music festival had been erected, every five hour drive from one show to the next, and the endless waiting back stage for the show to start.

It's been two years since then, and my life is barely recognizable from the life I was immersed in before that trip. I'm single, I don't live in San Francisco anymore, I'm back in Los Angeles, the city I love, the city my great grandparents loved when they moved here in the 1920s. I'm certain that a lot of the changes I've made since then are a direct result of those long drives down foreign highways. My boyfriend, the man with whom I shared a bench seat in the big black van, which had a surly, chain smoking Englishman named Gigsy at the wheel, is now part of my past, as is his daughter. The decision to leave him, and the life we had shared for five years, was made on that trip.

Staring out the window, watching the Belgian countryside whiz by, trying to ignore the choking cigarette smoke that filled the van and the incessant incoherent Cockney ramblings from Dicky, the lovable sound-guy who called everyone "Sheba" (the name of his beloved dead dog) because he couldn't remember anyone's name...my mind full, bursting at the seams.

With my white earphones tucked firmly in my ear, I listed to Apologies To The Queen by Wolf Parade on repeat for hours. It filled me with something...a longing. I wanted a different life, I realized. I wasn't finished making changes, and I wasn't happy...I felt stagnant. "I'll Believe In Anything" will always give me that dizzy feeling and remind me of the upheaval my brain was preparing itself for...that feeling that something exciting is just around the corner.

"I'll Believe In Anything" - Wolf Parade (mp3)

If I could take the fire out from the water
I'd take you where nobody knows you
And nobody gives a damn

Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording.

"Tired Yet" - Giant Drag (mp3)

"This Is It" - Giant Drag (mp3)

"Cordial Invitation" - Giant Drag (mp3)

You can listen to the new album here.

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

We resolved to be kinder to animals.

What a fun, sexy time for you.

A collector and the unsuspecting male.

The Rabbit Hole

by Karina Wolf

On Wednesday, Julia says she doesn’t want us to read for an entire week. No, she amends, not just no reading, also no talk radio, no music with lyrics, no television, no email, no web browsing, and no chatty phone calls that we wouldn’t ordinarily make. “I’m not going to tell anyone not to see a movie,” she hedges. “But there may be other things you can do with your time.”

The Artist’s Way is the perfect workshop for an aspiring Left Coast-ist. There are affirmations, visualizations, and the idealization of synchronicitous events. The author of the book and workshop, Julia Cameron, also talks about her ex-husband, Martin Scorsese (Sicilian Scorpio) and about herself (sensitive Pisces). She’s writing a musical and, sometimes, there is group singing, which she insists puts us in touch with our better nature.

julia cameron

It’s a strange group, between 50 and 70 students, a salad of Westchester moms, brides-to-be, guys with broken hearts and broken limbs, students who are doing NIA dancing, whatever that is, and a photographer who’s following the Diamond Approach. A latently angry lot. This is group therapy for artists, creative recovery according to Julia.

I’m open-minded about personal betterment strategies. I’ve been subjected to a lot of them, thanks to all the therapists in the family. I’m also starting to think that, like my dogs and my niece, I’d have a greater sense of security from a better set of rules. But as a freelancer who works from home, I know this will be an interesting experiment in madness.

On the way out, I check for texts, emails, and Facebook updates, call my dad so that he can recount the plot of two nights of In Treatment and walk to Magnolia to buy a fortifying dose of sugar. I suspect that the instrumental Arvö Part on my laptop will only heighten this Bergmanesque austerity, so I stuff my iTunes with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis (no duets with Ella, though: no lyrics!). I am now hopped up on green tea latte and chocolate cupcake. There is nothing to do but spy on the naked neighbors, clean the refrigerator and listen to “In a Sentimental Mood” 45 times.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Kyf67w2EcHQ]

Before I fired my acupuncturist, Dr. Y determined (through muscle testing) that all my problems stemmed from “the concept of living through others”. I want to congratulate him—the entirety of my thoughts and memories seem to come from media, ether- and other-generated materials. I linger nostalgically over my most recent media forays: that puzzling YouTube clip about John “Walnuts” McCain; the wiki entry about Charlie Parker’s recording of "Lover Man"; those Asobi Seksu songs.

Certain half-measures occur. Can I, for example, flip through the Maira & Tibor Kalman book of photos that I just bought? No words there. But I’m bargaining. It would be a little like when I went to the fascist nutritionist who nixed sugar, dairy, wheat, starches, fruit, caffeine, and alcohol from my diet. Sometimes the desire for bread became so intense that I’d have to unfasten a bag of sourdough just to sniff at the contents. If I’m still craving it, I’m probably not cured.

On Thursday, I’m perfect—most of the day. It’s raining so I can’t get Hector to install the pigeon wires. There is nothing to do but walk the pups and write.

I had already made plans to see Gemma Hayes and Mundy at Mercury Lounge, and I decide to soak up every locution and lyric that comes my way. Nourishment for my inner artist. Gemma Hayes has West Coast malaise: she was shopping for a bikini in LA and discovered the one she liked was dry clean only. Get it? Her remarks are a little evolved for the crowd, a rowdy Saint Patrick’s day warm up. But she is gracious when someone’s mobile phone interferes with the sound, and her song “Back of My Hand” echoes pleasantly in my word-parched brain.

Gemma admits that kids are cruel. When she was 9 or 10, there was a little boy in her class who kissed her while the teacher was writing on the blackboard. All the other students jeered. Gemma waited after school, beat the crap out of him, and threw the boy and all his copybooks into a puddle. A few days later, the boy came over to her, apologized and gave her a present. “So treat ’em mean, I guess,” she says, after apologizing to the memory of the humiliated schoolboy.

Mundy is a little rough around the edges. “Someone up here farted?” He waves his hands around. “It’s a fart with wings, then. Or someone has a very high ass.” He plays a couple of songs. I even get a shout out before his single from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack. There are a couple of wolf whistles, though my name means, obviously, nothing and Mundy also dedicates the song to some stewardesses, buxom blondes, and bartenders who are following him around.

Afterward, we find ourselves at the Scratcher, where Paddy Casey is sitting at the bar like a gnome on a toadstool. Mundy comes along, then the cabin crew from his Aer Lingus flight, then the guy from The Frames who won the Oscar.

At the bar, we talk to a transplanted record producer, Shuggie, whose eyes are springing from his head—think Susan Sarandon with hyperthyroidism. Can you guess where my name comes from, he challenges us. The most famous Shuggie of them all. Can you guess. Guess.

I take a stab. Shuggie Otis?

No. He’s crestfallen. Sugar Ray Leonard.

I met Mundy in Monaghan. Recalling this, he pulls out the book he’s reading—Patrick Kavanagh, he believes, is going to inspire the final song for his new album. I’m three paragraphs into the Monaghan poet’s The Green Fool before I realize I’m having Word Rush. I feel exhilarated and slightly queasy, the sensation you’d have shopping at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods after exiting a sensory-deprivation tank.

I hand back the book and start talking to Paddy, who is a cross between Vladimir Putin, Crispin Glover and Lyle Lovett. Discretion of Putin, stare of Crispin, frizzy hair of Lyle. He also has the tiniest, most recalcitrant mouth I’ve ever seen. His cure for writer’s block, he tells Mundy, is to unplug everything in the house and lie in the dark until something happens. Seems to work; he’s being followed around by MTV for a documentary about his new album.

We notice that Paddy is wearing seven layers of zip-up jackets. He is his own nesting babushka/tootsie roll pop. We set about unlayering Paddy Casey. He is resistant. He leaves at four because he has to make an in-store appearance at ten in the morning. How are you going to wake up, we ask him. I don’t have to wake up. He smirks. Someone will do that for me. This reinforces my thought that everyone needs personal support staff.

I have a hangover for four days.

The following afternoon, I meet another friend-from-abroad and we walk down past Battery Park to the piers. Spalding Gray departed on his final ferry ride here and this is the site of the catalytic events of Desperately Seeking Susan, when Rosanna Arquette loses her memory. It is pissing rain but my friend has never seen the Statue of Liberty and we decide to take the trip anyway. Why not? A chance to rewrite history. The last time I was in Staten Island, I had gotten trapped at a party in New Dorp and a 50 year old roadie was trying to read my palm (I was 17).

On the way over, it is grey and foggy and the windows are so steamed up it is impossible to see anything. We get out of the station, head for a bar and decide to exchange music. I’m violating the word-rules again but I reason that this is more of a melodic dialogue—my friend wants to play something new he’s written.

A big, balding, grey-complected guy is writing out bills at the bar. Hey, he yells. Take the earphones out and talk to each other. He keeps harassing until we turn off the iPods and chat to him. Not talking is gonna break you guys up. I’m assuming you’re a couple. We were, says my friend. We broke up an hour ago but we’re thinking of getting back together.

Sometimes people break up in order to make up. It’s the making up, if you know what I mean. Harold—or Harry, or Hal—starts singing Al Green songs.

He’s a widower (last May) but feels that he’s ready to move on. He also tells us that he lived in Bournemouth for 6 months, and the highlight of that time was his participation in Grab a Granny parties, the very Brit-perv tradition of going off for a night with an elderly woman. Hal went home with a 70 year old when he was 35, he tells us, and it was the best sex of his life. We cover our ears.

We return in heavy rain to line up for the departing boat. There is a giant aquarium in the waiting area. We look at the fishes. One of them looks like a parrot (it has blue, beaky lips), one is a stick of chewing gum, the silver ones resemble Lamborghinis, one strangely shaped guy with bulging eyes is kind of "slow." On the return, the ferry passes the Statue of Liberty, and we imagine having the lone night watchman job.

We had a week-long fling a while ago, me and this friend; we always have a good time but I’m suddenly certain that Julia would say the right thing is always to keep moving forward.

The next day, my father, Dr. W, stops by after the panel on erotic transference. He’s glowing. He liked all the speakers, he tells me, even the elderly Jungian, who was happily married and only realized her feelings of eros toward a patient after having a dream in which a Bengal tiger was riding shotgun in her car. I think you would have found it enormously helpful, my father tells me. Sometimes he forgets that I’m not a work colleague. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking. He has brought mail, including books I had ordered from Amazon. I’m not tempted, even though I had so much coffee at lunch that I lie in bed all night, thinking. Barry has started to snore. I wonder if he has a deviated septum, sleep apnea, food allergies.

On Sunday, I am forced to read. In these cases, Julia advises, we should keep a media log. I head up to my teaching job, spend the morning with the Koreans and write down: 7 vocabulary questions, one dual passage on Gone with the Wind and Sherlock Holmes, one long passage on wolf behavior, one New Yorker article on Michelle Obama.

I’m stoic on the return subway. I can’t listen to any more ambient music. I will just look at people, the way Maira Kalman does. I get home, can’t sleep, eat quantities of sugar, tear open the box from Amazon and sink into 90 pages of Susan Shapiro’s addiction memoir, in which she chronicles giving up smoking, toking, drinking, eating bread and chewing gum. I don’t even feel guilty, I’m enjoying it so much. I force myself to stop and do my own writing. I stop my own writing and finish the entire book.

Julia would call this a binge. Shapiro would say I’m “self-soothing” by practicing my word habit. Learn to get comfortable with suffering, her shrink Dr. Winters asserts.

I’ve been trying all week to think up things to tell George, my new therapist, and have been keeping a list of dreams. Luckily, the caffeine intake has produced some restless nights. I am able to recall that the character from V for Vendetta pursued me in the most recent one. George hasn’t seen Vendetta so he asks me to free-associate on the Hugo Weaving character. He’s wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, I muse. When I say that I associate Guy Fawkes with resistance instead of rebellion, George finds it very interesting.

susan shapiro

He’s also skeptical about the word assignment. I consider aloud whether conversation and alcohol are in violation of the no-media rule. “Words are supposedly allowing me to avoid feeling and now maybe I’m substituting conversation for feeling.” George thinks I think too much, and reminds me that it is healing to interact with other human beings. “I think it’s okay if you skip the logos fast,” he advises. In celebration, I go home and listen to podcasts with the Coen brothers and the screenwriter Ronald Harwood. Harwood is out of this world.

Then I receive an alarming email from my sister-in-law. I can’t help but read it.

I can't believe you are taking an actual class with the woman who wrote the Artist's Way! I can't believe it! I can almost remember her name, is it Julia Cameron? I didn't realize she had been married to Martin Scorsese. How many times has he been married, anyway? I know about 20 years ago he was married to a woman who had his baby at like age 55, but since it wasn't all over the news, I am guessing she used someone else's eggs and they hush hushed it. I remember thinking that was very intriguing at the time, and wondering why I couldn't read all about it in People Magazine. Was that the same woman?

I faithfully followed her book during a period when I was feeling incredibly uncreative, and I really adhered to the whole protocol down to the last detail. I certainly DO remember how tough it was not to read anything for that time, I remember forcing myself not to cheat and read the cereal box at breakfast.

Busted. My sister-in-law goes on to tell me that she was able to earn a living entirely from her own artwork after following the protocol in this book. I have to reconsider George’s words.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s book Seduction and Betrayal lies abandoned by the nightstand. In it, she writes about my favorite novel, Wuthering Heights. WH is not a deconstruction of social constructs like Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. (Was it Charlotte who wrote Jane Eyre? Without the internet, I’m creating an entire literary history, like that woman who wrote a world history entirely from her own spotty memory; or Maira Kalman’s mother, who drew a subjective map of the United States when compromised by dementia). The novel’s interest is in following a perpetuating psychic trap. And by this point, I know: I am caught in my own psychic trap.

I survive until Wednesday. Before class, I run down and take a picture of the billboard I keep thinking about whenever I walk by the river. Albee is always trenchant:

The best part of Wednesday night is when Julia reads out our cards about how we’ve completed the weekly assignments. We get to hear what each person has done for his artist date (an activity, carried out alone, that’s fun or stimulating artistically).

Someone went to see Richard Diebenkorn; someone saw Dianne Wiest in The Cherry Orchard; someone had a threesome. “I know it involves two other people, but my artist self was very happy.” Another student: “I wrote a love letter to a woman whom I’ve recently fallen in love with. I’m a woman with a boyfriend. It’s your fault, Cameron.” Guffaws and clapping.

Then we talk about how people experienced the reading ban. Some people found that words were a barrier between themselves and their own perceptions. Some discovered that no media meant they stopped living vicariously. Some people drew better boundaries. One student asks Julia how often she uses these kinds of strategies in her own life. “As needed,” Julia says. “I do it when the class does it. And then sometimes spontaneously. Probably a lot of you know that I had a nervous breakdown last year.”

from here

Clearly, not everyone knows she had a nervous breakdown last year.

A guy, who has told me he’s depressed, raises his hand and asks, “So what were the causes of your breakdown? Were they mostly external things?” I know that he’s asking because of his own difficulties, but it feels like an invasive question in front of a huge group.

Julia answers pretty honestly. A combination of external things, the wrong meds, a family history of depression—this hasn’t been the first time. She is so gracious and poised. Everyone is quiet. “I was fine on Tuesday—I was teaching this class—then all of a sudden, I couldn’t form sentences. My mind was fragmented. And it was interesting, because a lot of the recuperative therapy involved exercises like the ones in creativity class.” Suddenly, everyone laughs and any resistance evaporates.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives and writes in New York City. Her tumblr is here.

MUSIC FOR YOUR SUNDAY

"Danny Callahan" - Conor Oberst (mp3)

"On & On" - Ben Lee (mp3)

"Screenager" - Muse (mp3)

"Calliope (live)" - White Hinterland (mp3)

"Rain Ammunition" - Pavement (mp3)

"Count Flow" - Baby Panda (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Beard season brought out the bears of fall.

Jess vs. boys.

We engaged the enemy on its own soil.

Diary Of An Archie Fanatic

by Molly Lambert

Alex and I have our birthday coming up. It's this Saturday, September 13th. We will be one year older and none the wiser.

One of the many things Alex and I have in common is a shared love of Archie Comics. Archie is so square it becomes subversive by sheer force of consistent squareness. Jughead is a gay beatnik who hates working and women and especially working women.

I clearly remember a reprint in an Archie digest from the seventies about Women's Lib; Betty and Veronica join up, Arch and Jug get all freaked out, and then B & V realize Women's Lib is for humorless lesbos and drop out to go watch they boys do dumb stuff at Pop's Chocklit Shoppe some more.

The love triangle between Archie, Betty, and Veronica is the eternal struggle between Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, although in this case Jackie is the blonde and Marilyn brunette. Nothing is hotter than Archie fanfic. Nothing.

Once I bought some Archie comics at a bookstore and they accidentally undercharged me by several dollars. Catholic-Jew that I am, I went back to pay the correct balance. In retrospect I see this was stupid. I should should've taken the free Archies. Life doesn't always rain down free Archies on a body.

The Archie Comics website is perfectly bootleg. This is clearly a labor of love or forced work for minimum wages. Either way, it is awesome. It captures everything I enjoy about classic Archie, and updates it for the twenty-first century.

Archie & Jughead: Bloggin' With The Boys!

Reginald's Corner

Betty's Blog

Veronica's World

Comics Fan Art

Who's Who In Riverdale

Vote For Cheryl Blossom's New Boyfriend (Reggie FTW)

Actually Cheryl should just hook up with Midge now that she is rocking a Sam Ronson haircut.

OMG read Archie Comics online

Archie Old Time Radio Shows

Archie Trivia Quiz. I Scored 100%

Make A Fortune Teller

Bloggy Etiquette

Jughead Is Fierce

"The List of Dorms" - Pavement (mp3)

"Rain Ammunition" - Pavement (mp3)

"Quick Canal" - The Altas Sound (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING:

Mad Men At Mad Magazine

Who The Frick Let Betty Drive That Thing?

Russ Meyer And Larry Sanders

This Recording Is Jughead Christ

Vintage Violence: Grades 6-8

by John Gruen

Note: The author attended an all-boys school.

1. I told J he looked like Dickey Barrett from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. He slapped me in the face.

2. I swung a lacrosse stick at W's head and missed.

3. B threw me over a desk.

4. A made a spear out of a stick and killed all of the fish in the pond outside of the math building.

5. J, M and I stole food from the cafeteria everyday and put it in an unlocked locker we called the 'yucky locker'

6. M took a bottle of whiskey to his room and drank until he had a .24 blood-alcohol level.

7.  J, B and A used to kick T's ass every day after lunch. I would watch sometimes.

8. T bought a mouse, killed it and skinned it. He brought the body to school the next day and ate it.

9. I kicked A in the testicles for no reason whatsoever. Years later, he told me it was the most painful and confusing thing that ever happened to him.

10. M took a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica into the library bathroom, shat in it, and reshelved it.

11. W, J and J used to try to make me fight a different person every day to toughen me up. I never won.

12. My mom took T and I to Disney World and I got a rash. When we got back, T told everyone that she'd put Gold Bond on my balls.

13. J and W convinced J he was gay.

14. W and J played a game called 'Robinhood Shuffleboard' which involved shooting an arrow straight up in the air and running away.

15. G (and many others) told me that I was going to burn in Hell for being Jewish.

16. All the cool kids made themselves pass out.

17. B broke my glasses twice and called me a faggot when I asked him to pay for them.

18. Coach T made J demonstrate a new kind of sit-up in front of my whole gym class even though he had a visible erection.

19. W used to make A and I fight on his trampoline. This led to many bloody noses.

20. M stole all of my Pogs, and I ratted on him. This led to both Pogs and Magic cards being banned.

21. W made the sixth grade math teacher cry.

22. Someone (unknown, probably W or M) took a shit on the bathroom floor and stuck a AA battery in it.

23. M used to take his mom's muscle-relaxants in class.

24. Everyone hated C, M, C, B and K.

25. D drank a whole bottle of Nyquil before math class.

26. B made the Spanish teacher have a nervous breakdown in class. The teacher never came back to school.

27. P gave me his extra sandwich, which I later found out had a giant loogie in it.

28. One day while picking him up from school, J's father, who was ex-IDF, put J in a sleeper hold and made him pass out.

29. B, who was several years older than us, would whip his dick out in our faces at the carpool line.

30. T peed on all off the faucets.

31. M brought a screwdriver to school and stole all of the doorknobs in the English building.

32. One day a few years later J made fun of me for a failed club I started, and A spit a mouth full of water on me. I went home, started crying and was on anti-depressants the next day.

John Gruen is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can read his entry in Childhood here.

"Society" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

"Setting Forth" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

"Long Nights" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Our second trip to the MOMA.

Breaking and Entering was ridiculous.

Rufus is stuck in a mirror with you.

Pictures of My Father

by Tyler Coates

The first real memory I have of my father is, like most of my "first memories," actually something that was captured on video when I was about three years old. My father came home on his lunch break, and he walked into the house to find me screaming at my grandmother. Instead of calming me down or telling me to shut up, he instead took the opportunity to capture the moment on home video. So somewhere in my parents' house there's a VHS tape with clips of me stomping around my living room and screaming, "Day-day," which was what I called him until I was about five years old.

I think that perfectly introduces the relationship I had with my dad. I always joked that my mother was The Boss. At a very young age I understood that she was the breadwinner; she worked for the Navy as a computer scientist, whereas my father was dispatched around my rural Virginia area from the local Coca-Cola bottling plant fixing drink machines and fountain units.

Northern Neck Bottling Company, Montross, Virginia

There was never a strong conflict between my parents because of their uneven salaries. I didn't know how much they made until they co-signed on my first apartment out of college. When I say that my mother was The Boss, I mean it in the sense that she was the disciplinarian. She had a temper and very little patience for misbehavior, while my father, on the other hand, sometimes encouraged it.

Fleetwood Farm, Acorn, Virginia

My dad was born in Acorn, Virginia, which is a town only in the sense that there is a sign on the side of the road that reads "Acorn." He was born at home, in the house that my grandmother still lives in. He was the second of three children, and he lived at home from his birth in 1950 to the year he married my mother in 1976.

My father, my uncle Andy, my grandfather, and my aunt Lynn on the Minneapolis-Moline.

My grandparents were poor, which is a knowledge I grew up with. My father didn't tell stories about how he walked five miles to school in the snow (he only did it once - he missed the school bus and my grandfather refused to give him a ride). They didn't have indoor plumbing until my father was seven.

My great-grandfather, my father, my uncle Andy.

Instead of complaining about his family's poverty, he described it in the way he did about everything: with a self-deprecating joke. "When I grew up the only toys I had were a spoon and a piece of asbestos."

There are very few pictures of my dad as a child because my grandparents could not afford a camera. The majority of the pictures we have of him as a kid are school pictures, or, in the special case below, a photograph of his visit with Santa Claus in Richmond.

My father went to the same high school as my mother (which is the same school both my brother and I attended over twenty five years later), but they were not high school sweethearts. They ran in different circles (if that is possible when your high school has about two hundred students). He was in the FFA, a football player (because, as he told me, "They let everyone who tried out on the team."), and in two bands.

The Rambling Rebels (larger image and full caption here)

It should be noted that my father could be described as a Good Ol' Boy - he was raised in the South and matured during the '60s. While he missed the major action of the Civil Rights Movement (his was the last graduating class of the segregated public high school in 1970), he was certainly affected by it, as were most of his generation. My mother once admitted to me that people her age in the '60s sported Confederate insignia and repeated the line, "The South will rise again," but, in her words, "We didn't really know what that meant."

At the same time, my father loved the music of the black artists that recorded with Motown and Atlantic. He saw Aretha Franklin and the Jackson Five in concert, and even when I was a kid, I remember the sounds of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Wilson Pickett playing on the car stereo. So, while he was in a band called The Rambling Rebels and pasted the Confederate flag on his drum set, he sang in another band in 1968 called The Soul Creations.

The Soul Creations - my father is the second from left. I'm sure they sounded a lot like Spoon.

My parents went on their first date just after Christmas in 1972; my mother was a freshman in college and home for break. My father, who was four years older but one year ahead of her in school (he had been kept back two grades, she skipped one), was working his first job out of high school digging septic systems.

My parents always seemed like completely opposite people to me. My father grew up poor, my mother upper-middle-class. My paternal grandparents were uneducated farmers; my mother's father was a lawyer who graduated from the law school at the College of William and Mary (he was a member of a group students who saved the law school from closure - the state originally wanted to have one supported law school at UVA), her mother a retired schoolteacher and housewife. Both of my maternal grandparents could trace their lineage to the First Families of Virginia. My mother, of course, was a debutante.

After four years of dating, my parents married in June 1976 and settled in the area where they - and their parents - grew up.

When speaking of the day he married my mother, my father always said it was the second happiest day of his life, the first being the day his father sold the pigs. His third happiest day was the day my (younger) brother was born in 1989; the fourth being my birthday in 1983.

I have to find some truth in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes before you die. After all, your life flashes before your eyes all of the time: memories come in and out of your head in a fluid motion. Like dreams, they don't often follow a logical pattern, nor do they always represent what actually happened in the past. When I think of my childhood, things are hazy in the sense that I'm not entirely certain I'm remembering what actually happened to me, or if I've just seen those things in pictures for over twenty years.

I have the same feeling when I remember my father, who died in May of this year from pancreatic cancer. I look at pictures of him and think, "Yes, that is what he looked like." But away from photo albums, I don't see him at 38, when I was five years old. I can look at a picture of him in high school, or in 1978 and think, "That is my father, and that is how I knew him."

But during the day, away from the scanned images of those old photos, the picture in my head is from three months ago: my father is 57, and he is laying in a hospital bed in my parents' room. For the first time in his life he does not look young for his age; he is old, tired, and his wrinkled skin is loose on his face because he hasn't eaten in two weeks.

There are, luckily, no pictures of my father from the last two months of his life.

My father and me, Christmas 2006

My father was diagnosed with cancer in February 2007. With most cases of pancreatic cancer, the diagnosis comes months, even weeks, before the patient dies. My father, on the other hand, was extremely lucky; his cancer was still in early stages, and his doctor was very confident that with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation, my father's life could be extended immensely compared to other patients. He did, however, specify to my parents that the number of patients who lived for five years without the cancer returning was very low. My father, forever the optimist, replied, "So, we do have a chance!"

August 2007

My father had an amazing personality. I can't count the number of people who told me that he had never met a stranger, simply because he somehow managed to get along with nearly anyone. I credit his small-town upbringing; at the same time, he grew up with a notoriously unaffectionate father, which made my father completely opposite. My father would demand a hug and a kiss from my brother and me when we were fifteen, in public no less.

November 2007

My father responded well to his chemo and radiation therapy, and by the end of November 2007 he was in remission. At the same time, however, he tried to hide that he knew that his days were numbered. In August, as we crossed the bridge from the Outer Banks of North Carolina (where my parents have vacationed every year since the early years of their marriage) to the mainland, he cried and told my mother that it was the last time he'd be there.

After Christmas he unsuccessfully attempted to conceal his illness from my mother, which is difficult when you're trying to hide feelings from a person you've known and spent nearly every day with for thirty-five years.

Dad went through a second round of radiation and chemo, which left him withered and tired. By the time he went into hospice care in May of this year, he had lost about 90 pounds. I flew home from Chicago for what was originally supposed to be a weekend visit, but I spent three weeks at home. I came home in time for his last few days of being aware of his surroundings, floating in and out of a morphine-induced haze.

He held on for a week and a half, which my family spent holding a vigil of sorts. There'd be hours were we sat around the rented hospital bed, crying and holding his hand, hoping for a quick release from the pain that my father's illness was causing all of us to experience. Other times, we'd be down the hall in the living room, slamming down multiple glasses of red wine, which, like the casseroles and flowers delivered by the neighbors, were brought into the house in bulk shipments.

We prepared for my father to die, but in a way that surprisingly felt like a party rather than a somber occasion. We told stories about him and shared the memories we had. My mother and my father's sister argued over events that took place in those stories, I listened to the familiar tales that had changed and evolved over the years.

It sounds like a cliche, of course, but it's true to my father's sensibility. He was a storyteller, a joker. He always had some elaborate tale to tell, and he never told the same thing twice - which, of course, was unintentional. He was plagued with a bad memory, and he couldn't help but tell the same story over and over, but it changed each time. Fittingly, the preacher who delivered his eulogy somehow managed to mix up the stories that my mother and I provided as research. He placed me and my brother into a story of a trip to Washington, DC in the late '70s, for example.

Growing up, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were divorced - so many, in fact, that I felt left out that mine were still together. I only knew one girl who had a parent die when she was a young age. I felt both normal (in the sense that losing a parent as a child was something that only happened in movies) and out of place (because I only had two parents, not four). Growing up, I realized that my parents had a nearly perfect marriage, despite their opposite upbringings and childhoods. I can't imagine what it is like to be married to someone for almost 32 years (and being with that person for almost 36) and suddenly lose them.

My father left a lot behind when he died. For my brother and me, there is the enormous cache of stories and memories, both from our lifetimes and previous. I have pictures of him - a few from his childhood, even more from my parents' life together before I was born, and a ton since then.

My mother, on the other hand, has two sons who look a lot like their father. She has the house they built together when they married. And she has my father's final gift, which is the last metal Coca-Cola sign he built and painted for the owners of Driftwood, which was my parents' favorite restaurant.

My father's name, which he printed on his final sign, is just above the entrance to the restaurant. He told the owner that he did it for my mother, so that whenever she went there for dinner, she'd know he'd always be there with her.

Tyler Coates is the contributing editor to This Recording. He tumbls here.

FROM THE JOHNNY COATES MIX TAPE

"Domino" - Van Morrison (mp3)

"Respect" - Otis Redding (mp3)

"Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)" - Otis Redding (mp3)

"Chain of Fools" - Aretha Franklin (mp3)

"I Thank You" - Sam & Dave (mp3)

"The Underdog" - Spoon (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Prayer in a wailing wall.

The moment was alive and lost.

Falling tragically short.

Subterranean Homesick Jews

by Molly Lambert

To see these gorgeous parody ads from the late fifties/early sixties back covers and inside front pages of Mad Magazine in their full spendor, and be able to read the hilarious fine print, visit this excellent flickr set.

Hey Gang! Let's Play 43 Man Squamish!

New terminology is introduced with no explanation; much of the humor derives from the reader's half-successful attempts at gleaning a meaning from context. Exactly what everyone on the team is supposed to do, exactly what penalties apply and exactly when or why the yellow danger flag is to be flown remains far from clear, even after repeated readings.

From Wiki's entry on Mad Magazine:

Though there are antecedents to Mad’s style of humor in print, radio and film, the overall package was a unique one that stood out in a staid era. Throughout the 1950s, Mad featured groundbreaking parodies combining a sentimental fondness for the familiar staples of American culture, such as Archie and Superman, with a keen joy in exposing the fakery behind the image.

This Cadillac one reminds me of Joan Holloway

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding on the radio, Ernie Kovacs on television, Stan Freberg on records, Harvey Kurtzman in the early issues of Mad: all of those pioneering humorists and many others realized that the real world mattered less to people than the sea of sounds and images that the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into American lives. - Dave Kehr

Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis wrote about the then-25-year-old publication's initial impact:

It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that in New York City on Lafayette Street, if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles.

Mad's consciousness of itself, as trash, as comic book, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids. In 1955, such consciousness was possibly nowhere else to be found.

Mad is often credited with filling a vital gap in political satire in the 1950s to 1970s, when Cold War paranoia and a general culture of censorship prevailed in the United States, especially in literature for teens. The rise of factors such as cable television and the Internet have diminished the influence and impact of Mad, although it remains a widely distributed magazine.

In a way, Mad's power has been undone by its own success; what was subversive in the 1950s and 1960s is now commonplace. However, its impact on three generations of humorists is incalculable, as can be seen in the frequent references to Mad on The Simpsons.

There's more time for fun when this one line of copy takes 10 seconds to write for the Polaroid Land Camera ad campaign!

Mad was long noted for its absence of advertising, enabling it to skewer the excesses of a materialist culture without fear of advertiser reprisal. For decades, it was by far the most successful American magazine to publish ad-free, beginning with issue #33 (April 1957).

Pulitzer Prize-winning art comics maven Art Spiegelman said, "The message Mad had in general is, 'The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.' It was basically 'Think for yourselves, kids.'"

.

Patti Smith said, "After Mad, drugs were nothing."

William Gaines offered his own view: when asked to cite Mad's philosophy, his boisterous answer was, "We must never stop reminding the reader what little value they get for their money!"

Spy Vs. Spy was invented (in 1961) by a Cuban National

HELP! Magazine

Trump Magazine

Humbug Magazine

We will refrain from commenting on MAD TV.

The great Daniel Pinkwater wrote an essay, collected in Fish Whistle about his first experience with Mad Magazine.

Arnie Kogen wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His son Jay Kogen wrote some of the best early Simpsons episodes, including the original Treehouse of Horror with partner Wallace Wolodarsky, who was the inspiration for Otto The Bus Driver.

The original Simpsons lunchlady; Doris Grau, was a gravel-voiced character actress in the spirit of Selma Diamond.

The Usual Gang Of Idiots:

Bill Gaines

Tom Koch

Will Elder

Al Feldstein

Don Martin

Will Eisner

Wally Wood

Basil Wolverton

George Woodbridge

Al Jaffee

Harvey Kurtzman

Bernard Krigstein pioneered the artistic use of comic book panels as a temporal dimension.

Russ Heath

Jerry DeFuchio

Mort Drucker

Jack Davis

Jack Rickard

Bob Clarke is Cutty Sark

Norman Mingo is Alfred E. Neuman

Joe Orlando is Sea Monkeys

Songs In A Jugular Vein:

Crazy - Lil' Wayne: (mp3)

Crazy Rhythms (live) - The Feelies: (mp3)

Crazy You - Prince: (mp3)

Crazy 'Bout You - Christine (McVie) Perfect: (mp3)

Crazy Blues - Angel'In Heavy Syrup: (mp3)

Baby Drives Me Crazy - Thin Lizzy: (mp3)

Beat Crazy - Joe Jackson: (mp3)

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Will Hubbard Is TR's Pin-Up Boy For Poetry

Will's Fancy Foreign Netflix Queue

The Cat's Just Fine He Never Left

Missed Connections And Faceblindness

THIS RECORDING IS POTRZEBIE

He Was Only One Man

by Alex Carnevale

Like most people, Hitler was a hypocrite. But at least he was one hell of a hypocrite.

If Hitler didn't exist, what would Alan Dershowitz do for fun?

Robert Proctor, who wrote an award-winning, widely esteemed book called "The Nazi War on Cancer points out that this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars. They were as central to the ideology of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Now, that is not the same thing. And I want to be really clear about this: That is not the same thing as saying that banning smoking is as morally disgusting and reprehensible as trying to wipe out the Jewish people. You can say that something is as much part and parcel of an ideology and not say that it is as evil.

- Jonah Goldberg

This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life. Proust

Hitler wasn't much of an artist:

Hitler's sense of humor:

According to the book by the last surviving member of his bunker, Hitler recounted how Mrs Goering found her husband waving a baton over his underwear in the bedroom and asked him what he was doing.

He replied: "I am promoting my underpants to OVERpants."

Hitler was a man who got pissed off and did something about it. Some people fall in love, some people have revenge fantasies.

"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death,” Hitler explained to his aides. “A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.”

That's actually pretty good writing there mein Fuhrer.

If Hitler was alive today, he'd be like, "MoveOn.org: those guys got their shit together." Hitler's nom de plume on DailyKos would be "peacebanger." This is only our way of saying He is everywhere, but mostly in Rob Reiner.

Hitler did it all, including....ahem.

"He should have put a paper bag over his personality." - Hitler's dog, Blondi. Hitler didn't have any children. He felt they were annoying, so he got a dog.

He had a fiancée, Mimi Reiter in the 1920s, and later had a mistress, Eva Braun. He had a close bond with his half-niece Geli Raubal, which some commentators have claimed was sexual, though there is no evidence that proves this.

All three women attempted suicide (two succeeded), a fact that has led to speculation that Hitler may have had sexual fetishes, such as urolagnia, as was claimed by Otto Strasser, a political opponent of Hitler. Reiter, the only one to survive the Nazi regime, denied this. Some theorists have claimed that Hitler had a relationship with British fascist Unity Mitford. More recently Lothar Machtan has argued in his book, During the war and afterwards The Hidden Hitler, that Hitler was homosexual, while others argue that he was largely asexual.

more pics of hitler and blondi here

Whenever someone is saying, "I reeeeeallly want to get a dog," I think of Adolf Hitler.

He killed Blondi by testing out a cyanide capsule he would use on himself and Eva.

Hitler's tumblr would be reblogging central. People who reblogged him would be all like, "Heil, mein Führer!"

He said, "If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower." He said, "By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work," he said, and did not himself believe in the Lord.

Anti-semitism was Hitler's favorite thing. He was into anti-semitism like you people are into Obama. JK, we are all unknowing Obamacites. But if you were having a conversation, the Jews would just suddenly come up, as with Obama and everyone I and Pauline Kael knows. ("This sandwich tastes like a Jew" etc.)

Hatred and fear of Jewish people is the lowest condition of existence. It is the first words out of the mouths of our enemies, then and now.

Every time you see a group of people worshiping something, assume it's at the altar of some bad idea.

Nazi women have a rich history. When in doubt, get a hard drinkin' Nazi woman. Everyone loves to go German. It's wrong. It's bad. It's evil.

Hitler was a non-smoker and promoted aggressive anti-smoking campaigns throughout Germany. He reportedly promised a gold watch to any of his close associates who quit (and gave a few away). Several witness accounts relate that, immediately after his suicide was confirmed, many officers, aides, and secretaries in the Führerbunker lit cigarettes.

What makes people do evil things? It's amazing that he thought he was doing what was right. A young man killed his girlfriend and dismembered her body in their bathtub. He wrote a short note, went to the top of the building, and threw himself off it. On the way down, he hit a flagpole and his body separated into two pieces. What pleasure is in an act of evil? Must it feel deserved?

We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilisation will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation. Winston Churchill

The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. Elie Wiesel

weird flickr debate over what happened to hitler

All these images of him and children. He's like a hypodermic needle. He probably invented AIDS.

hitler and mussolini

There is basically no end to how amusing I find this clip:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC9XfcJFeOM]

We have the greatest to fear from the cynics. Even in the most jaded of commentators there remains a miasma of hope. In the writings of Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and that guy from CounterPunch, we can see the weight of a cynicism that is one with death.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording until the gingers take over.

BREATHE IN THE MOUNTAIN AIR...SWEET DELICIOUS EVIL

"Under Calf, Winged Steps" - Yasushi Yoshida (mp3)

"Lasted in Different View" - Yasushi Yoshida (mp3)

"Three Winters Our Trace" - Yasushi Yoshida (mp3)

Try explaining Hitler to a kid. George Carlin

hitler as a babe

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9GymQr5_ZI]

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

The hair makes the man in No Country for Old Men.

Venus and Serena remind us of the future.

John C. Reilly’s beautiful singing voice.

Recentlyish On This Recording

by Molly Lambert

We Objectified Directors

Dick Cheney Got LOST

Viva La Oral History Of The State!

We did A Scorsese Week, Nobody Wrote About Taxi Driver

The Sexual Politics Of Skyscrapers

BRITNEY WOWCH!

Phil Spector & R. Kelly Are Guilty As Sin

We Took Jack Nicholson To Task

We Met The Real Life Iron Man

Celebrity Couples Confused and Amazed Us

Indiana Jones Got Rowdy In A Malt Shoppe

"Let's Stay Friends" - Les Savy Fav (mp3)

"The Year Before the Year 2000" - Les Savy Fav (mp3)

"Scotchguard The Credit Card" - Les Savy Fav (mp3)

The Internet Is Ash & This Recording Is Lotion