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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I followed the story on Howard Stern’s web feed, thanks to my co-worker’s Sirius subscription. Usually, I demand that he listen to something else, but the Imus dust-up kept me interested for the whole week. Despite his unwavering stand on free speech, Stern had a more personal axe to grind. All week, Howard alternately hooted with joy at the fall of an old nemesis and gnashed his teeth as he recounted the shitty treatment he received at the hands of Imus and Co. when they both worked for the same station. I was loving it.

Just the same, even though I’m just a white, adult male (who’s been known to run his mouth on occasion), I still feel degraded by racist and sexist language. In fact, I even felt that sting once at the hands of Howard Stern himself. It was back in the 90s, when the Meat Puppets were at the peak of their popularity. Howard took a shine to us, appearing on stage during one of our New York shows, and inviting the band on his show twice. We jammed with him both times. He was very nice to us, both gracious and encouraging; he even broadcast our first visit on his television show.

But the second visit left me with a bad taste in my mouth. That time, our manager appeared with us. I should mention that in addition to loving us enough to stick with us and put up with our bullshit, our manager was also a black female. When Howard turned his attention upon her — insisting that she was sleeping with us, and demanding that she admit she preferred sex with white men — she was merely embarrassed. But I was ashamed at how insensitively Howard treated our friend, and how he tried to get the band to go along with it. After all these years, I still remember how it felt: like a hard slap to the face.

Meanwhile, the backlash picks up steam, as a confused America debates “who can say what” and who’s allowed to “get away with it.” Some quarters are bewailing the loss of a “good man,” felled by agenda-wielding media jackals. Of course, where I work, and probably where you work too, they call it “harassment” and prescribe mandatory preventative “sensitivity training” for all employees. It seems to me, the lesson is very simple: use good judgment, be compassionate and tread gently on other peoples’ feelings. I don’t see what’s so politically correct about that.

Episode Three Tracklist:
“Fashion People” – Pizzicato Five
“My Life” – Nelson Riddle
“Meet the Swinger” – Poloroid Camera
“I Can’t Find The Time” – Groovin’ Strings
“Come On Sign” – Joe E
“Blame It On The Pony Express” – Hugo Strasser
“Yume No Tameni” – Puffy
“El Bimbo” – Ray Conniff
“Traffic Jam” – Tommy Roe
“It Happened On a Sunday Morning” – Jerry Ross Symposium



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It’s not that I’m much of a cause chaser — more like a bitter old poop increasingly disdainful of the view outside his front door. But this internet radio deal has got me more than a little disgruntled. Perhaps it’s because I’m too close to it. I suppose it’s easier to remain indifferent if it’s not actually happening in your own backyard, easier to take the position of “keep it behind locked doors” or “it’s your own fault for getting sick,” or “you should have been more mindful over the circumstances of your birth.” As young outlaw indie rockers, my band mates and I used to call it “floating anarchy.” That is to say, freedom is where ever the police are not. It’s a great concept, as long as you’re extremely mobile and not particularly invested in anything. And as long as your “freedom” doesn’t conflict with corporate interests.

You could make the case that the punitive snuffing out of internet radio is nothing but a trifle when our young fighting men and women remain in harm’s way. To me, consolidation is consolidation, whether is takes place in the marketplace or on the battlefield. I suspect that armed global occupation will remain The American Way at least as long as people keep driving their cars to the protests. The difference between a land mine and a corn syrup sandwich is one of degrees. Both can be deadly. Either way: in the final analysis, we’re all expendable. Voting won’t change that; praying certainly won’t. We don’t even need “new ideas;” the old ones still work. The trick is to remember what they are.

Not that the above has anything to do with this week’s charming podcast, which I promise is full of nothing but sweetness and light!

Episode Two Tracklist:
“Cuckoo Laugh-In World” – Laugh-In Cast
“Dance To The Music” – The Going Thing
“It’s A Beautiful Morning” – Martin Denny
“Where’s The Beef?” – Coyote McCloud & Clara Peller
“Topless Party” – Nomiya Maki
“Kites Are Fun” – Tony Mottola & The Groovies
“Good News” – The Klowns
“The Wonderful World of Color” – Four Freshmen
“In My Hole” – Roy Budd
“Mr. & Mrs.” – Tony Hatch
“The Drifter” – Sandpipers



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Back in high school, I was naive enough to think we had them safely on the ropes. The Watergate affair and its attendant fallout was so encouraging. But three decades later, it’s obvious my optimism was premature. Bombing innocent foreigners, depriving the American people of their civil rights, robbing the country blind at the behest of corporate cronies — as it turns out, this stuff doesn’t really bother people all that much. Hell, the man in the big chair does it today — no problem. But the swearing was just too much. After the release of the transcripts of Nixon’s White House tapes, the country realized that they didn’t have a nice person in the White House. They just weren’t comfortable having such a potty mouth for president.

After that, America stuck with candidates that seemed like ordinary family men, folks that reminded them of the guy next door. Mainstream media began giving more and more play to the reactionary “family values” that continue to dominate the discourse today. But back then, we considered it an aberration, the decadent death throes of an old order. If we paid any attention at all to such “spokespersons” as Anita Bryant and Pat Buchanan, it was only to laugh at them. When, after a highly entertaining local political contest, the despicable John Conlan lost the Republican primary to the equally hateful Sam Steiger, who in turn took a trouncing from the Democrat Dennis DeConcini, how could we not puff up our chests? How were we to know how much grass roots ground work these forces were laying? Who could have guessed how effectively they would sweep back up on the table what I had always believed to be be dead straw issues like personal liberty, freedom from theocracy and sane foreign policy? Perhaps if we had known then what we know now, we may have chosen more effective weapons against them than custard cream.


Expletive Deleted

The family that campaigns together

The presidential sibling demeans our beer

Funnies reflect American values

Singers seeks prison terms for homosexuals

Patrick Buchanan denounces Gay Pride Week

Woman Derives Being From Man

Conlan Disputes Accusation

Sex Film Protest

Lipstick message in Idaho threatens Carter

Schafly meets Kay: The pieman strikes!

In addition to the aforementioned entertainers, and several swell ads for “the taste that beats the others cold,” the disc also features the Firehouse Five Plus Two, the Golden Horseshoe Revue and a peek at the newly-opened Pirates Of The Caribbean attraction. This fixes the date of this recording around 1967, the year that ride opened, and also the year the “Pepsi pours it on” campaign began.

Speaking of pouring it on, this particular post, by the way, marks our first anniversary together here at Bostworld. To those of you who’ve hung in there with me, suffering my (mostly failed) attempts to turn my overly-wordy prose into the semblance of a readability, I offer my appreciation and my sympathy. I hope the carrots I’ve tossed in your direction along the way were an adequate recompense. To those of you offended by my harried sense of humor, I apologize for the misunderstanding. To the friends, family and acquaintances who were able to successfully ignore my pleas to read this thing, I commend your tenacity. As for everyone else, you probably stopped reading midway into the first paragraph.

Anyway, to all of you, thanks for visiting, see you in 2007, and, no, I’m not planning on stopping (famous last words).


Download “New Year’s Eve At Disneyland”

Alternate Link

Now, I’m not the kind of person who’ll go to all the trouble to digitize an old piece of vinyl — cleaning all the flaws the best I can, ripping the tracks into individual (properly tagged) MP3s, uploading the whole mess, then try trying to come up with a worthy paragraph or five of doggerel to hang on it — just to invite my readers to make fun of it. Frankly, my time is worth more to me than that. This isn’t to say the Bostworld record gallery is impervious to ridicule — far from it. This week’s cowardly and extremely bland selection is a perfect example. But only within the scope of the bigger picture does the disk take on its true sheen of glory.

You can laugh at anything if you take it far enough out of context. Even the great books would seem ridiculous if you, say, translated them badly into Portuguese and read them backwards. But to be considered a truly oddball classic, a work must retain its mundane foolishness even in the light of its actual circumstances. The first thing I want to know about some new head-scratcher is why it happened, who was behind it, and what were their motivations. Unfortunately, more often than not, it ultimately boils down to money. The cheesy treasure you love so much came into being for one simple reason: its creators were desperate to do nothing more than keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies.

This is something any of us can relate to. I myself came late to the job market. After a decade of climbing into the limelight, and another decade crawling back out, I finally discovered what life was like outside of the fish bowl. What I learned made me afraid to ever check into a hospital or go up in an airplane, let alone trust another person to cook my dinner. Here in the “real” world, it seems even the simplest things get messed up by inadequate training, lack of communication, poor follow through or inattention to the details.

But there are people out there for whom incompetence means more than just a missed delivery, a lost sale, or even a shoddy product destined to become a kitsch classic. It means the difference between life and death. So add my name to the list of “celebrities” honoring the men and women of the armed forces this season, not because of their career choices (call me old school but “what if they gave a war and nobody came?”), but because the pain they’re suffering at the hands of fuck-ups makes my own pain seem negligible in comparison.

As Florence Henderson reminds us during her segment, “these thoughts are year-round propositions, or at least they oughta be.”



The United States Navy Presents “A Different Kind Of Christmas”

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You know, I pride myself in being a crank. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor energy to achieve the heights of public misanthropy I aspire to. And though I try to make up for my lack of talent though sheer force of smugness, I also make sure to sound the alert whenever I discover a voice rising out of the contentious mush that pleases my ear and tickles my fancy (such as James Howard Kunstler’s column, which I continue to follow every week).

During my election day web trolling last week, I found a great essay by Jeff Snyder, “Voting: Suppressing Change Through the Pursuit of Power.” Managing to be be both insightful and mind-numbingly wordy at the same time, Snyder decries the essential counter-productivity of the American electoral process, as well as the damage it inflicts upon the national discourse:

The essence of the vote is the acquisition of power over others, not, note well, the good faith determination of the relative worthiness of specific societal goals. If it were the latter, the vote would be structured as a vote on goals or programs, and the Congress and President could be a semi-permanent group of functionaries or administrators whose job was nothing more or less than to implement those goals in good faith. As the prevalence of negative campaigning illustrates, because the essence of the contest is to determine who will rule over others, the contest invariably turns on the character of the persons who will exercise this power…. The nature of the contest — the pursuit of power over others — by its nature creates polarization and opposition, and calls forth ugly emotions and underhanded tactics.

Though such circumlocution by itself offers ample pleasures, Mr. Snyder also makes a good point, albeit perhaps an obvious one. But he’s just warming up. Snyder continues at considerable length:

It is sometimes averred that, whatever defects government by majority rule has, it has the merit of minimizing conflict by providing a means by which the majority can achieve or pursue its goals, without resorting to actual violence and bloodshed. This is wrong, however, because the system is founded on opinion and it costs next to nothing to have an opinion…. It is far too easy to hold beliefs that are little more than self-flattering opinions about oneself that one takes credit for holding…. Far from minimizing conflict, therefore, a system of majority rule founded on consensus multiples conflict and makes conflict more likely, for it is too easy for men to espouse beliefs and principles for which they, personally, will never experience serious consequence, and for which others — some small minority — will pay the price.

By establishing a system founded on the marshaling of opinion, people who believe that the best or most efficacious means of achieving their goals for the country is by securing victory for their party are shunted into perpetually busying themselves with building party and consensus, and to that extent cease doing actual work to achieve their goals. And this, from the perspective of the elites who benefit from the status quo, is the great stability and improvement inherent in democracy, in contrast to other forms of government: by offering the commoners the prospect of acquiring power, and a power founded on marshaling those who share similar views, people busy themselves primarily with the acquisition and maintenance of power and efforts to build “consensus,” thereby effectively preserving and prolonging the status quo.

He goes on to cite Thoreau and Dickens before reaching his conclusion, that real change can come only from without the political process. For example, a truly meaningful action for someone against the war would not be to elect Democrats, but rather to work to create alternatives for people who “choose the military out of the necessity of their personal circumstances.” Frankly, I couldn’t agree more.

All of this is presented under the aegis of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a purveyor of weighty tomes and long essays about various aspect of civil and fiscal policy. Unfortunately, I have almost as much time and energy for the in-depth study of cranks as I have for the becoming of one. So if the site has a secret agenda beneath their their ostensible libertarianism, I do apologize. They describe themselves thusly:

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), with a vast array of publications, programs, and fellowships, the Mises Institute, with offices in Auburn, Alabama, seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth….It is the mission of the Mises Institute to restore a high place for theory in economics and the social sciences, encourage a revival of critical historical research, and draw attention to neglected traditions in Western philosophy.

While I could never consider myself a believer in free-market economic policy, I can’t help but admire the kind of free time the Institute and its founder Lew Rockwell must have on their hands. And as someone who also struggles with loquaciousness, I can offer a certain sympathy. For people of like enthusiasm, I recommend both sites. Readers secure enough in their own beliefs and confident enough to navigate the precarious waters of partisan discourse will find these essays very entertaining, for both their outsider vantage point and their wordiness.

I know I’m a bad person for hijacking outlander content for a post. But this week has set an all-time record for being from hell, and, well, since it’s tax season and all, perhaps we could all use a little break.

Two links have been going around recently, both concerning the grandaddy of all planned communities. Both sites offer detailed documentation and analysis:

Levittown: Building the Suburban Dream

Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb

I myself first learned of this glorious slice of postwar history many years ago, from a book called Yesterday’s Tomorrows : Past Visions of the American Future. But it was more concerned with fanciful atomic age futurism than suburban planning. The book itself is great; not a popular collection of photographs and sarcastic captions, but an expanded catalouge for an exhibit prepared for the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service. As such, though it’s too short (and too small), the book offers an acceptably in-depth and insightful treatment of its topic.

We’ve got a dilly of a planned community north of Phoenix, called — unfortunately enough — Anthem. It goes without saying that it’s sterile, isolated, destructive of the desert, unable to support itself economically and above all, reeking of dystopic population control. But it also apparently got a pass on having to pony up tax dollars for infrastructure. As huge as it is (and growing; oh yes), it’s serviced only by the same four lane highway that the rest of us have to use.

Consequently, we’re seeing reports in the news about folks leaving for work Monday on Sunday night and staying in town all week. There’s just no way to get the commuter traffic through. Though the various municipalities involved are scrambling to find money to fix the problem, at this point there is no plan to widen the freeway for NINE YEARS.

Somebody check me on this one — it can’t be right!