Errors-To: ecto-owner@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #824 ecto, Number 824 Sunday, 24 October 1993 Today's Topics: *-----------------* Today's jumble, or: It's deja vu all over again Re: Welcome to the Church of The Dancing Dead...i.e. DCD does Atlanta Re: PC/digital meltdown Skip a dee doo dah pc Sarah McLachlan & Jane Siberry T-Shirts? more on DCD Rubberband Post Re: Famous artwork on album covers Ecto: Threat or Menace? Famous Artists? Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 14:24:09 CDT From: Subject: Today's jumble, or: It's deja vu all over again The November _Request_ magazine, which I got gratis with some tape I bought at Musicland the other day, carries a very favorable review of _The Red Shoes_. It highlights the tracks "Top of the City," "The Song of Solomon," "Why Should I Love You" (A collaboration with Prince, to whom the review refers only by his glyph-name, which a sidebar elsewhere in the book debunks as a combination of the alchemic signs for mercury and gold), and "You're The One," before giving fleeting mention to what it calls more significant numbers like "Eat The Music" and a few others. Interestingly, it never mentions "Rubberband Girl." By an ironic coincidence, the next review is of a Ryko box set by Elvis Costello, who once recorded the song "Red Shoes," though the review doesn't mention that. The same issue also carries short features on The Mekons and Kirsty MacColl. For some unknown reason, I find myself amused by the headers on the duplicates of posts from the last couple of days that we got courtesy of the "news" and "nobody" servers. Perhaps to the gallery of memorable pseudocharacters like Orel Gratification and Linda Happyvangelista could now be added the transvest- ite recording artist, RuRecEcto :-). Maybe it's just the aftereffects of repeated pointers to who really recorded "Brain Salad Surgery," but somehow the machine which sent us these bonus blasts from the past, dziuxsolim.rutgers. edu, reminds me of an old Anglican hymn also covered by ELP, after it's been put through Uli's C compiler :-). Mjm takes and runs with the following ball originally pitched by Jeff: >|actually part of the vast amusement park known as Chicagoland (where >they >|hell did they come up with that nickname anyway?) [...] The way I understand it, the word was made up in the first place by the _Chicago Tribune_ back in the days when Col. McCormick ran it, presumably to denote the paper's broader metropolitan circulation area at a time when suburb- anization was still in its relative infancy. Mike titles this post "Give Peas a Chance," which somehow reminded me of how The _Trib_'s legendary head of market research during the 1950's, the late Pierre Martineau, once wrote that his affinity for the Philadelphia Phillies was a natural outgrowth of his fascination with the letter P. Today's weather is relatively nice in Chicago, so I surmise it should be so in Toronto over the weekend, as the aforesaid team endeavors to keep its championship hopes alive, presumably without rain delays. Mike goes on to say that a member of our cybercult, soon to be passing through Chicagoland, >[...]willp >robablymoveherein2monthslikeyouallshould[...] On the other hand, if we all actually did that, it would no longer make much sense to have the listserv in Jersey. Kiri's post, however, accidentally suggests a way out of that fanciful dilemma: > [...] Us >old goths had a good chuckle over the baby-goths, and anti-goths that If we could somehow get the whole ecto infrastructure installed in the Univers- ity of Chicago's computer, it would be but a stone's throw from the greatest repository of Gothic architecture on the south side :-). The comp center building itself isn't Gothic, but nothing's perfect. Perhaps if we saved our pennies assiduously, we could eventually donate a few megabucks on the conditio n that the university carve a couple of Happy's monster designs in the facade. :-) (But could we get any record store in Hyde Park to finally carry Happy's music? None that I know of do now.) Those of us who are fascinated by what DCD's instruments might be might also enjoy Kendra Smith's EP, _The Guild of Temporal Asventurers_, whose instrumen- tal parts are performed not only on harmonium, but on a pump organ to boot. The car accident thread apparently still being alive: The only one I've ever been involved in entailed only property damage, but two decades ago a friend was involved in one which should easily take the cake for sheer preposterous- ness: She was carrying a bag of groceries, on the green light, through an intersection which was essentially empty except for one parked car. The driver of the latter then abruptly started, barreled through, and sent her and the groceries traveling straight up and straight down. None of the groceries left the bag; my friend suffered the normal and customary soft tissue and other traumas secondary to such an impact. The driver stopped, went over to the spot where she was more or less flat on the pavement, and asked, "didn't you see me?" All this, plus Aeren's joke about the Chicago Symphony becoming the Chic- ago Stereo Orchestra, plus the news items on the demise of funding for the superconducting supercollider, somehow got me to wondering: if Solti had dem- onstrated a predisposition for getting involved in multiple fender-benders, would the wags of the local music community have dubbed him the supercolliding superconductor? :-) :-(' WRT Aeren's query, Keith Haring did indeed do the cover art for both the "Very Special Christmas" albums. I'd have to check, but it wouldn't surprise me if both carried the same drawing. Aeren goes on to ask: >Mitch - Um, can you say PC is a social movement, since the term >is really only used as an epithet? Does anyone define themselves as >pro-PC? Yes, no and yes, IMHO WIVH. I certainly see it as a movement, under whatever name; and its adherents as well as its detractors have been known to call it "political correctness." I once saw a flyer pasted to a lamppost by some ultra left organization, touting a meeting where the topic of discussion was to be why it was important, and why one should be proud, to be politically correct. I assume that they defined themselves as pro-PC. (I wrote the preceding before reading Brni's exegesis of all that, which I'm currently too fatigued, after a long day of reading mailing lists, to engage at length right away.) I'm not sure that skipping CDs make all that weird a sound. What scratched CDs _are_ capable of is getting the beam stuck, so it goes back and forth in the same spot and spits out the same sound repeatedly. Now that's weird-sounding. Mitch --------------------------------- "(I think we're spending too much time hugging and not enough time kissing... lips can be so sensual and hey, everybody's got 'em...)" --Michael J. Mendelson "You do know how to kiss, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow backwards." --not Lauren Bacall :-) ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 17:04:49 -0400 (EDT) From: michael welker Subject: Re: Welcome to the Church of The Dancing Dead...i.e. DCD does Atlanta Excellent description of the concert... an experience I'd love to share, but I haven't seen any listing of their tour dates... all I know is the November 12 concert in chicago (so far the closest) is sold out... help!! ======================================================================== From: neilg@sfu.ca Subject: Re: PC/digital meltdown Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 14:17:14 PDT > to be politically correct means that you go along with social > mores that you do not hold yourself, simply because they are > social mores, that is to say, because it is politic to do so. Hmmm... Interesting definition. My take on the whole "politically correct" thing is that it was used by political conservatives to make progressive and liberal views seem repressive. (I'm using these terms in the US sense, incidentally) An ingenious ploy. You have people who wish to make certain changes to political and social systems. By branding these proposed changes as serious threats to individual freedom (even though the status quo is, in and of itself, a serious threat to the individual freedom of many marginalized groups) debate is conveniently stifled through the application of the label. In addition, describing someone or something as politically correct implies a repugnant sense of moral superiority *and* some sort of large and dangerous movement - even if there isn't one. Take those claims by conservatives that this frightening wave of political correctness is sweeping US campuses. Well, frankly, university campuses are some of the most conservative places around, you ask me. Anyone who, say, questions why their university accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in military or corporate funding is decried as a dangerous threat to personal liberty and part of a huge movement of PC-ness. Sounds a bit witch-hunty to me. I think that if a particular description of an ideology is hammered on long enough then many people will come to believe it. So we get women who say that they are not feminists, because feminists are all hairy lesbian man-haters. Or people who say that they are not environmentalists because environmentalists are all radical weirdos who want to destroy jobs and have us all living in the Stone Age. I remember one having this discussion with a woman at work years ago. She was convinced that feminism, by definition, meant "female supremacy" and not "female equality and equal rights" and therefore she was opposed to feminism. Still, it's a clever technique! Identify a tiny fringe element in a group you oppose (and if there isn't one make one up) and then paint the group in terms of this fringe, and watch everyone run away. > let it be known that i *hate hate hate* the way people throw that > term around. it is being used the same way that communist is > used in this country: if a person is a communist, or has been > simply *called* a communist, then nothing that > they say is right, and we don't have to bother actually listening > to what they say to know they are wrong. likewise with this > whole PC name-calling bullshit. Yep. Guilt by association. This talk of communism makes me smile - I think of the members of the Communist Party of Canada who stand every weekend a couple of blocks from my house with their rather pathetic propaganda. I think it's funny that they're there, though. In the US it's still illegal to be a member of the Communist Party, I believe. In the Land of the Free one cannot choose to be a member of any party you want. So, of course, communism is still seen as something scary. Most Canadians laugh off the Communist Party as a bit of a joke. "Hee, hee! Those guys are at it again!" The Communist Part of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), mind you. They've sort of splintered into various factions like the guys in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" - "What happened to the Popular Front of Judaea?" "He's over there!" > >Neil - No, albums skip with a nice sort of sound. cds skip > >and sound like...well, they sound _weird_. > > > actually, my albums go . the cd's go into "digital > meltdown." if they had been invented earlier, george lucas would > undoubtedly used them for his _star wars_ sound effects. I've never found albums skipping to be a particularly nice sound. And I have had CDs on some players that skip just like vinyl - there's a faint click and then the player has jumped ahead a few seconds. Of course, there are those that just go crazy and skip and loop all over and those don't sound very organic at all. My favourite CD for noise has to be a cheap semi-bootleg of early Bob Marley. It said "Digitally Mastered" on the front. Yeah, right. Turns out they took the source *off vinyl* - they didn't even get it off master tapes! The only CD I have that makes good ol' vinyl-scratcy noises when you play it! - Neil K. -- 49N 16' 123W 7' / Vancouver, BC, Canada / neil_k_guy@sfu.ca ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 17:30:40 EDT From: woj@remus.rutgers.edu (not just the size of a walnut) Subject: Re: Welcome to the Church of The Dancing Dead...i.e. DCD does Atlanta "John M. Relph" sez: >I would say Hammered Dulcimer, but I'll bet it's actually another >instrument, possibly the cembalom (sp). might be a yang t'chin, which is a chinese instrument similar to the hammered dulcimer, but smaller in size. you can hear one, for sure, on this mortal coil's "dreams made flesh" from _it'll end in tears_ (played by lisa gerrard, incidentially). +woj ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 14:48:04 PDT From: dixon@physics.berkeley.edu (David Dixon) Subject: Skip a dee doo dah If you'd like the pleasure of CD skip without the permanent damage, just do like I did once and spill coffee all over a stack of CD's, then forget to clean one of them until the coffee's all hard and sticky.. this happened to my copy of _Bone Machine_ . It's okay now (CD's are wonderfully easy to clean), but my my my .. it sounded like John Oswald or other musical collage-ists held Tom Waits at gunpoint and chopped up his master tape into itty bitty pieces. D^2 ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 17:58:35 EDT From: woj@remus.rutgers.edu (not just the size of a walnut) Subject: pc for some reason, a little voice in my head is telling me that the term "poltically correct" was originally used by a group of leftish thinkers as a joke to describe their views. the term was then picked up by the conservative right and used in a defamatory manner and the rest is, as they say, history. or herstory. or hysterically, if you perfer. ;) +woj ======================================================================== From: bilver!bdoherty@osceola.cs.ucf.edu (Benjamin J Doherty) Subject: Sarah McLachlan & Jane Siberry T-Shirts? Date: Thu, 21 Oct 93 14:22:52 EDT Hey, I must have missed something. I want some Sarah McLachlan T-Shirts! What's the address? What about Jane Siberry T-Shirts? Where can I get those? (sorry for being such a RAQer [recently asked question]) -- internet: bdoherty@{bilver.oau.org|pro-magic.cts.com|delphi.com} bbs: Starkist: +1 407/859-9999 ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 17:06:45 CST From: kiri Subject: more on DCD oh I failed to mention one really amusing part. There were some baby goths that I was really worried about sitting directly behind us. I thought they would blabber the whole show. Ended up that the entire place was in the same state of complete absorption that I was and it was pretty bloody quiet. Anyway I stopped worrying about the baby-goths after the first song ended and they actually had to pant to start breathing again!! I found it extremely amusing....but in all honesty i was just as breathless as they were. Aside from the bad wiring short-circuiting off of lisa's mike at one point, causing obnoxious speaker fuzz, and the fact that they didn't play Ullyses..which is one of my all time favis, it was a pretty flawless and tight performance. oh yeah a couple other things.... Lisa seemed like a very reserved, shy person. She would always pause before singing to make sure everything was perfect. Brendan was in tight control over the other band members. He makes a brilliant conductor. :) that's enough gooshing kiri ======================================================================== From: Philip.Sainty@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Philip Sainty) Subject: Rubberband Post Date: 19 Oct 93 10:15:34 GMT hmmm... just found this in my mailbox: > From Postmaster@ns1.rutgers.edu Tue Oct 19 21:00:11 1993 > Date: Tue, 19 Oct 93 03:59:45 EDT > From: Postmaster@ns1.rutgers.edu (Mail Delivery Subsystem) > Subject: Returned mail: Cannot send message for 3 days > To: > > ----- Transcript of session follows ----- > 421 axon.rutgers.edu.tcpld... Deferred: Connection timed out during user open with axon.rutgers.edu > > ----- Unsent message follows ----- > Received: from kaukau.comp.vuw.ac.nz by ns1.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.5/3.08) > id AA10469; Sat, 16 Oct 93 01:31:31 EDT > Received: from greta-pt.comp.vuw.ac.nz by kaukau.comp.vuw.ac.nz with SMTP > id for ; Sat, 16 Oct 1993 18:31:11 +1300 > From: Philip Sainty > Received: by greta-pt.comp.vuw.ac.nz > id for ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu; Sat, 16 Oct 1993 18:31:10 +1300 > Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 18:31:10 +1300 > Message-Id: <199310160531.AA08624@greta-pt.comp.vuw.ac.nz> > To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu > Subject: Rubberband Girl soooo... did anyone actually get my post? (sent two or three days ago I think) weird... To summarise, for those that missed it, Rubberband Girl was the fifth most requested song on a local radio station the other night!! (I found out by chance, as I very rarely listen to the radio, and haven't done so since, so I have no further information) The other thing was that you won't hear an awful lot from me for the next several days, as my exams begin this Friday (and Saturday :-( Philip (who has spent far too little time studying today...) .________________________________________. ._______. | __ _ ___ _ __ __ |\________/| | | / / | / \ | \ | | | | / | _ _ | _O_ | | \_ | | | | |__/ |__| | | \_ | / \/ \ | |/ | | / | | | | | | | | | / | \ / | |\ | | \__ \_ | \_/ | | | | |__ \__ | \ / | T W W | |________________________________________| \/ |_______| \ Philip Sainty: psainty@comp.vuw.ac.nz \________/ / `-------------------------------------------------------' "This is where I want to be This is what I need" --KT ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 16:56:35 PDT From: Neal R. Copperman Subject: Re: Famous artwork on album covers >>Would you count the Rev. Howard Finster? I think he's the sort of artist >>whose work most people recognize but might not know his name. >> >>The album I'm thinking of, of course is _Little Creatures_ by the Talking >>Heads. (has Finster done any other covers? I know he has a mural in an >>REM video...) >> >>Jeff Finster also did the cover of REM's Reckoning album. neal ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 23:00 EDT From: robert@deepspace.nj00802.sai.com (Robert Lovejoy) Subject: Ecto: Threat or Menace? Egad, it's a PC world after all! Say, this place has been wild lately! Lurkers unlurking, CDs skipping, PC on the PC, Summer, New folks (Hi!), baseball, net.polls.Happy, car accidents - and more! Some lilly-livered cowards (or poor folk) have left us due to volume (How do we do it?)! Yet ecto remains for me a most mesmerizing place. I just hope nobody (Albert?) is angry with me about the Happyonecto thing; as I said I was trying to make a liability into an asset. I was one of the yes votes, but I was hurt a little that some of you took it so hard. Did anyone else remember some of the posts after Happy posted here from her last Philly Meet & Greet? Ah well, feathers were made to be ruffled. Sorry if anyone got offended... Looks like most if not all of us are getting Deja-vu posts. The Ghost In The Machine (police thread!) I forgot at least one other perfect song: "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" by Stevie Wonder. A true catharsis! I'm sorry I'll be missing DCD in Philly; I'm just too broke these days. The Firesign Theare will be here around the 11th, I hope I can make that, but as Woodrow Stool's wife admonished in "In The Next World You're On Your Own": "We owe a lot of people a lot of money for a lot of airports!" (bought to you by Dead Cat Soap: There's a dead cat in every bar!) (This album was right before "Roller Maidens From Outer Space"). Philly has been hot of late, concertedly speaking. Meryl Cadell(sp?) is in town, DCD, FS, many more. Oh, and baseball. That too. Well, time to go. Time to turn off my PC - um, hmmm. Great observations, folks, and bravo brni for your wonderful post on pcness, as well as the multitude of great posts you contribute to this list. And that goes as well for the rest of you, dammit! Y'all have a great weekend, enjoy the music, and hoa binh! Bob the mildly enthusiastic ps -Summer is indeed a great song. Please add it to the list! ======================================================================== Subject: Famous Artists? Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 20:33:22 CDT From: Joe Zitt Are we limited to rock albums? Off da toppa my head I can think of: Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz (Jackson Pollock) Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel (Mark Rothko) Brian Eno: Another Green World (Tom Phillips) Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach (...uh... damn, one of my favorites) The Beatles: The Beatles (Robert Rauschenburg B-] B-]) ======================================================================== From: Tree of Schnopia Subject: Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 02:09:34 -0400 (EDT) Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! (Drewcifer just got RhodeSongs from Borders. He's loopy and bippy. He loves it *so* much.) Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! (Drewcifer also bought Cabaret Voltaire's Western Re-Works 1992, and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. But he's really thrilled to own RhodeSongs.) Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! (He'll be all right. Just give him a couple of days to come down off the moon.) Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! (Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, Drewcifer's one happy monkey!) Happy Happy! Rhodes Rhodes! Drewcifer ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is an INDEX file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)