Archive for the 'Obligations' Category

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Vacation Special: Robert and Bobby Kennedy

Published on June 10, 2008 in Obligations and Treasure. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Happy fucking fortieth anniversary, America.

I can still remember clearly the 6th of June, 1968. That’s the day I learned that “Bob” was short for “Robert.” To my mind, there were two Kennedy brothers running for president that year. I knew the Kennedys were a big family, and they all seemed to be in politics. So, to my seven-year-old mind, it followed. It was incredible to me, then, that not one but both of them managed to get shot in the aftermath of the June 5th California primary. And the next morning, when it was announced that Robert F. Kennedy had died in the early hours of June 6th, I remarked, “Boy. I wonder how Bobby’s doing.”

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The Golden Age of Driving – European Edition

Published on June 3, 2008 in Obligations and Obsessions. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Gasoline is up to four dollars a gallon! It’ll be up to FIVE dollars by Christmas! In five years, we’ll be looking back on these times as a golden age as we pay up to TWELVE DOLLARS A GALLON for the noxious liquid! We’ve all heard the wailing. Well, it can’t bother me too much, because not only are my wife and I still filling up and driving all the way to the next town for a freaking vegan cheeseburger (shades of Presley), but we still squander stupid amounts of treasure on useless crap that we find in second-hand stores. Was it the exhaust fumes or the post-lunchtime torpor that caused me to decide to spend ten dollars recently on a plastic bag filled with European postcards?

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Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Eleven

Published on May 20, 2008 in Obligations and Treasure. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Sure, here at Bostworld, we’re all about the fetish objects — the scrapbook items, the out-of-print vinyl, the odd junk found in the back of the closet. This is the very meat of our little weekly visits. But (for me, anyway) these things are nothing without the accompanying line or two of snarky commentary. At the end of the day — for better or for worse — it all comes down to the content.

That’s the way it used to be over at LuxuriaMusic.com too. Back in the days of their first iteration, I couldn’t even access their live feed, let along the chat room and live deejay cam — not until I was able to convince my wife that broadband was the way to go. But back then, Luxuria must have had folks on staff that did nothing but pump the site full of readable content damn all day. They were lousy with great articles about just about every obscure musical fetish you could want. This was back in the optimistic golden days of the Dot Com Boom, so I’ll bet there was enough VC capital lying around to pay people actual salaries for this sort of thing.

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The Damon Show, Part Two

Published on April 29, 2008 in Obligations. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The masses have spoken: you LOVE The Damon Show! Actually that’s not true. Compared to the numbers that followed Boing Boing’s link to our “The Little Cloud” filmstrip, only a small handful bothered to check out the other material on my YouTube “channel.” But that’s okay; Damon’s fans like it — especially those folks who were actually in the show! This is problematic, since he keeps getting requests for footage that only exists in my collection on old video cassettes buried heaven knows where in one of my closets. I’m a loving brother and all, and certainly the cruddy VCR copies should be preserved one day, but for now, I’m sticking to stuff that’s already in the can.

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The Damon Show, Part One

Published on March 25, 2008 in Obligations. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

About fifteen years ago, between the time he moved from Bisbee, Arizona to Tucson, and when he finally escaped to the outskirts of Pearce, my brother Damon discovered the awesome Access Tucson, one of the finest public access television providers in the country. Theirs was a great partnership. Suddenly he was peppering me with requests for old cartoons, pictures from the internet, copies of his various recordings, any raw material he could use for a grand project, the outlines of which I could just barely make out. Next thing I knew, he was pressuring me more than usual to drive down to Tucson and help him out with a television program he claimed to be putting into production.

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Les Humphries, R.I.P.

Published on March 18, 2008 in Obligations, Obsessions and Treasure. 51 Comments Tags: , , .

Though it happened over two months ago, word of the death of Les Humphries in England is just starting to trickle out onto the internet. Apparently, he died on the day after Christmas, of heart failure brought on by a severe case of pneumonia. He was 67 years old. Unreported in his native country, Humphries’ death didn’t come to light until eight weeks later when his son contacted Les’ estranged ex-wife, German singer Dunja Rajter. Since Humphries was a bona fide pop star in Germany, that country’s press and blogosphere has reported it dutifully. European tributes are not hard to find, but as far as I know, Bostworld is the only outlet originating from America that has given the matter any space at all.

I don’t feel like rehashing the details of Humphries’ brief but prolific career. You can read about him the same way I did, on the German news sites. Google Translate reveals the sad story: “Les Humphries had in recent years lived very withdrawn…. He was sick, he had incredibly many problems, which he probably only by a certain amount of living could compensate.”

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Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Ten

Published on March 11, 2008 in Obligations and Treasure. 2 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve been running a WordPress plugin called ShortStat for most of the life of this site. It’s a great little time-waster at work, offering the standard innacurate hit counts, plus referral links that I can visit when I get bored. Occasionally, a new one will appear, but usually it’s the same dozen or so sites whose readers apparently can’t resist visiting good old Bostworld (god bless ‘em).

This last week, ShortStat and I reached a milestone of sorts. No, we didn’t log our millionth hit — that’s still a long way off. But we did banish a certain now-defunct share site from the list of the top most frequent referrers. A lot of you music lovers will remember this site, run a former music biz guy with an axe to grind (more so than the rest of us, anyway), posting every album he could get his hands on. He linked to our very first share post, “The Genius In Harmony” by the Anita Kerr Singers, and brought in so many referrals that we were swamped for the better part of two weeks. We were new back then, and the massive hit counts made the future seem very sunny indeed.

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