Anyway, I’ve finally finished my yearly task of archiving last year’s photos, and already my nascent education is affecting what I consider worth keeping. Suddenly, a whole new catalog of errors jumps out at me: blown out skies, camera shake, clueless use of flash, noise, chromatic aberration, and of course, mediocre composition.

But they say that a healthy part of any education is putting your work out there for better or worse, so here’s the short list from 2007. It’s no surprise that my favorites of the bunch are actually the ones taken by my wife. But this year, I hope to surpass her in at least the math department, which she hates.



So I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that so many of my favorite share blogs can be all but ignored during this time of year. From October right up through December, a fever seems to take hold which requires even the coolest bloggers to post endless feeds full of holiday themed material. From Halloween’s spoken word ghost stories and haunted house sound effects records, to Christmas’s unrelenting pageant of “kitschy” Christmas music , the holiday season renders most share blogs virtually useless for nearly one full quarter of the year.

This isn’t to say I’m totally immune. I suppose I’ll be whipping out the Specter Xmas disc at some point, and I admit to a fondness for Dean Martin’s Christmas album. I even allowed my wife to drag me to Brian Setzer’s holiday extravaganza. His version of Les Brown’s “Nutcracker Suite” arrangement is quite charming, and his new album of classical music covers, “Wolfgang’s Big Night Out” makes a terrific Christmas stocking stuffer. But for the most part, I never had much stomach for music of Yule.

Over at LuxuriaMusic.com, they’ve begun a new tradition in supplement to Christmas. They’ve set aside the anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon to honor the Beatles. As a rule, the Fab Four canon is actually forbidden at the station, not so much because of aesthetics as much as the overwhelming been-there-done-that position the Beatles hold in our popular culture. But boy, do we love us some oddball Beatle covers. For my show, “C’mon! Live A Little” (heard on Saturday afternoons), I whipped out my killer Donny and Marie disco version of Wings’ “Bluebird” and Tom Jones’ absurdly upbeat version of “We Can Work It Out.”

It was a fun day and I can pretty much guarantee that everyone had a splendid time. And, we (hopefully) raised a decent amount of scratch to keep the station going. (Yes, the fund-raiser appears to still be in effect, and much like Christmas or the war, it threatens to to continue into perpetuity and consume all within its reach.)

As for Your Favorite Little Podcast, you can see that there’s not a single holiday song in the entire episode:

“Winners & Losers” – Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
“Nikki” – Vincent Bell
“I’ve Got You On My Mind” – White Plains
“Lady Love” – Les Baxter & 101 Strings
“The Girls Of Paramaribo” – Berry Lipman Orchestra
“Funky 75″ – Sunshine Band
“Words And Music” – Hot Wheels
“Voce E Eu (You And I)” – Johnny Keating
“Love Thy Neighbor” – Dean Martin
“Since You Opened Up The Door” – Sonlight Orchestra
“Indiscrete” – Frank Sinatra, Jr.


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For instance, I’ve been recording fundraising spots for LuxuriaMusic.com, where I host a weekly music program. They must be desperate for cash, because as cheesy as they are, the station plays the damn spots at least once an hour. Of course, if they don’t raise the money, I may not have any reason to record any more. Lux only needs paltry few thousand dollars to keep the station running, but hey: this is the internet we’re talking about. Paying customers are few and far between. Of course, if everyone who reads this blog were to head on over and give ‘em even five or ten bucks, it would most likely make a huge difference.

If free content is more your thing, now you can jump over to the WFMU blog, where they’ve graciously commenced hosting individual Love Workshop programs from my collection, complete and unzipped for easy review.

But the loggrolling doesn’t stop there. As of this month, I am now an official contributor to 43 Folders itself! My first effort is already online, and — god help me — it’s already been seen by more people than visit this site in a year. My article is less about productivity than it is about the lack of same, but I think it’s a good start. I’d like think Merlin’s admiration of Bostworld led him to make this offer, but I imagine he’s probably more impressed by the cred from my former life than by the kitschy downloads and paeans to local squalor found here. In fact, I’m sure of it! But who knows: if the collaboration proves to be mutually satisfying, I might try to talk him into coming over here some time and sharing some of his guilty pleasures with us.

Oh yeah, before I forget: here’s some more Bostrom-generated web content that I didn’t get paid for:

“All Of Me” – Guitar Underground
“Lipton On The Move” – Lipton Tea
“I Still Believe In Tomorrow” – John & Anne Ryder
“Phoenix Love Theme (Senza Fine)” – Dick Hyman
“A Smile At Dawn” – Bebu Silvetti
“I Know My Daddy Loves Me” – Magic Of Love
“For A Few Dollars More” – Terranova
“The Not Too Distant Future” – Ivy League
“His Eyes, Her Eyes” – Michel Legrand
“Loving Things” – Today’s People


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In those days, I had a whole arsenal of characters. Kee-Lah was a blithe, childlike everyman, protected from the effects of his awesome self absorption by the sheer fact that he was fictitious. Painman was one of many deconstructionalist superheroes. He seems to derive his power from the jaded assumption that his use of physical force will achieve the desired outcome. The narrative treats his victory as a foregone conclusion, concerning itself merely with the inevitable restoration of normalcy. Prez is another meta-character whose only purpose is to follow the conceit of his conception to its logical extreme.

As for the Burger Family, perhaps the less said about them the better. They do lead me to suspect however, that spending most of your day sitting in front of a notebook might be a practice greatly aided by a certain deliberately induced state of mind.

A couple of Tuesdays back, I got a new job — a promotion, actually. Nothing too amazing there; getting it was the easy part. The tough part will be filling the position I just vacated. Unfortunately, I can’t hire myself, so I guess I’m kind of screwed. But what’s really odd is the same day I got the job, my old partners in crime got started on their second act as well. Now that they released their “comeback” album, they’re well on the way back into the hearts of guitar rock fans everywhere. Of course, I “declined to participate,” as the reviewers tell me. And it’s true. I can’t imagine giving up sleeping in my own bed every night — and even getting paid for the privilege (with benefits) — to go back on the road and work the same club circuit I played 20 years ago.

Just the same, I got less congratulations for the promotion than people coming up to me, telling me how excited they were to see my picture in the papers (apparently, some of these newspapers need to update their photo archive). I tried to be as gracious as I could, but I silently thanked my lucky stars that no one’s interested in airing my dirty laundry in public.

But there was another second act that week: Internet radio got a stay of execution. It’s a somewhat dubious one, with ominous strings attached, but it’s the only one we’ve got, so it will have to do. But another group of independent content providers was not so lucky. Without the benefit of the news blitz afford to new media, independent print publications took their lumps in the shadows, losing their campaign to overturn a ruling raising their postal rates by twelve to fifty percent. Many people didn’t even find out about this one until the rates took effect — coincidentally enough, on the same day royalty rates were supposed to kick in for online broadcasters.

Like my wife says: “small world.”

Episode Six Track List:
“Clearway” – Saint Etienne
“Gone With the Wind” – Frankie Randall
“Love Me For a Day” – Davy Jones
“Discontented Disco Children” – Rock City Boys
“Window Shopping” – Magic Disco Machine
“Seaway” – Brian Fahey
“Under the Sea” – Doodletown Pipers
“This Is Love” – Archies
“Faraway Music/The Girl With The Sun
In Her Hair/Crossroads” – Alan Hankshaw
“Ask Me What You Want” – Terry Baxter



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America’s much vaunted Independence Day is still a week away, but we’re dusting off our old Fourth Of July program anyway. This episode holds a special significance for me, and I’m not talking about patriotism. In my brief spoken episode, I offer ambivalent tribute to my state of unemployment at the time. Six years later, my pavement pounding days are hopefully behind me, but the independence afforded by a steady paycheck still strikes me as Kristoffersonesque at best.

But I wasn’t the only one out of a job six years ago. My playmates over at LuxuriaMusic.com had themselves been knocked out from behind their deejay consoles after their parent company was acquired by the ubiquitous Clear Channel. Like me, it took some time, but they eventually got back on their feet. But now, they’re being threatened once again by the very entity whose existence we celebrate on July 4th: the even more ubiquitous United States Government.

Just in case you didn’t know, of have forgotten, the new royalty rate increase for net radio goes into effect on July 15, rates so impossibly high, observers have been forced to speculate that they are designed to drive off all but the most deep-pocketed players.

Today, June 26th, is the day of internet radio’s Day Of Silence protest. If you are a internet radio fan, and you don’t like what you hear today, I urge your to contact your congressional representative and ask them to support the “Internet Radio Equality Act” (IREA) (H.R. 2060 in the House and S. 1353 in the Senate). For more information, visit SaveNetRadio.Org.

Episode Five Track List:
“You’re A Lucky Fellow Mr. Smith” – Frank Sinatra
“Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You” – Tiny Tim
“Where Have All Our Heroes Gone” – Bill Anderson
“World Of Winners” – Massey Ferguson
“Happy Birthday/Grand Old Flag” – Donny Osmond
“Tupperware Spirit Of ’76″ – Tupperware
“The Fightin’ Side Of Me” – Merle Haggard
“I Am An American” – Edmund O’Brien
“You Never Had It So Good” – Frank Sinatra & Bing Crosby



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Since our entertainment was taken care of, all we had to do was map out a short list of vegan restaurants in the city. These were our anchor destinations, around which we planned our urban hiking adventures. Unfortunately, we left our Trimble-compatible mobile phone at home, so Geocaching was out. But naturally, we brought along our camera. For as terribly hayseed-like as it may seem, there’s nothing I like better when I’m in the city than a good long gawk at all the tenements. There’s something about a code-straddling subsistence-level multi-family dwelling that starts something fluttering in my breast. I don’t even mind if it’s just a crumbling old boarded up office building, as long as its got that hungry look of potential flammability about it.

Of course, to truly capture these mighty beasts in their own habitat, I’d have to live among them. But one look at the state of my complexion after a mere three days on the street tells me this option is out of the question. The slow buildup of toxins would surely kill me. So you’ll have to forgive my piddling and rather scatter shot approach. Still, I think the cumulative effect of the photos is stirring enough. I’ll leave the detailed documentation to those better equipped for more extended efforts.

Bostworld received this kind of attention about a year ago, when Boing Boing linked to an article of excerpts from an old Uncensored magazine. That time, fueled by the promise of smut and acerbated by the fact that the files were actually served from my shared host account, the onslaught of visitors took the whole site down (as well as its sister blog over at Meat Puppets Dot Com). Tech support wasn’t much help: “Give us more money” they suggested, “or maybe take your business elsewhere.”

Fortunately, I figured out what to do on my own. In the course of returning things to normal, I discovered that my chosen platform (WordPress) is considered a resource hog. I also learned some load-bearing strategies. So I’m happy to report that when the awesome power of Frauenfelder came knocking this time, though things did get a little wobbly, the site held.

Say what you will about file sharing services like Rapidshare, they kept me up and running. Thanks also to Ricardo Galli Granada, whose WP-Cache plug-in may or may not have helped me weather the storm.

Episode Four Tracklist:
“1900 Yesterday” – Liz Damon & Orient Express
“Oh Calcutta” – Ferrante & Teicher
“Mama, We’re All Crazee Now / Didn’t Know I Loved You (Til I Saw You Rock and Roll) / Come Along Girl” – Les Humphries Singers
“Desafinado” – Ten Tuff Guitars
“Where Would I Be Without You” – Hardy Boys
“Push” – Chakachakas
“Soul Ballet” – Peter Nero
“Oh John Henry” – John Henry Singers
“Something to Think About” – Bert Convy



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Soon the girlfriend moved out and the roadie decided to follow another band to Seattle. He tried to mitigate the money he owed me by leaving a bunch of his junk behind in a storage room adjacent to the garage. One afternoon, in a fit of reclamation, I got rid of it. I traded the records for credit, donated the clothes to charity, hung on to a couple of interesting publications, including the stamps in this series, and threw the rest out.

I can’t believe my old roomate ever collected stamps; he must have hung on to these for sentimental reasons. Or else, he acquired them himself from another past roomate who owed him money. They are definitely not the coolest dustcatchers lying around my house, nor the most valuable. I’d have to devote my life to researching the variances in printing and postmark to see if I have any profound rarities. Otherwise, I’d probably have to pay a collector to take them off my hands. The only real value they have to me is creating a nice big Flickr checkerboard.



In 1972, the road show of “Hair” came to Phoenix, and incredibly, this man not only wanted to go, but even allowed me to accompany him and my mother. He had apparently wanted to “gain insight” into “the younger generation.” But all through the performance, my stepfather wore a grim mask of terrible disapproval. The drive home was most uncomfortable. After fifteen minutes of stony silence, he suddenly barked, “I don’t care what the two of you think, but you can tell your friends, and you can tell you children, and you can tell your grandchildren, that I thought it was a dirty, DIRTY show!”

I couldn’t admit it then, but I myself had been somewhat disappointed. I liked the songs very much (and I certainly appreciated the nudity), but a mere five years after its ground-breaking debut, the show was, even then, painfully dated. My step-father’s reaction was even more so, of course, but for him it was too late. The show had insinuated itself so deep into our culture by the early 70s, that even my step-father would have known every song by heart. Easy listening cover versions from “Hair” were a positive cottage industry back them. The show was a godsend to a generation of band leaders and arrangers, for even the squarest among them managed to get some action from “Hair.”

Of course, Don Kirshner is no ordinary “square,” but his long pedigree hardly needs enumerating here. Besides, working in a merely “supervisory” capacity on this record, Don must cede most of the credit to producer/arranger Herb Bernstein. Whoever, the responsible parties cook up a reasonably funky approximation of a groove here, with a solid rhythm section and plenty of those cheerful vocals that helped lull guys like my stepfather into such a false sense of security.


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