Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 02.15.2019

post-Valentine edition

Welcome back to yet another Weakly Reader! (The exclamation point there tells you to be happy and excited about it. Do it!) This past week was mostly Valentine related. A whole lot happened. And some things didn’t happen. This is just par for my course. You can read about whatever you missed below, or re-live it in the unlikely even that you didn’t miss it, or find it in future if finding things in future is your bag. In a world where nothing works, you need work-arounds, and you might as well make them as fun as you can make them if you have to have them. Fun, fun, fun, fun…

Anyway, here’s to love and records and songs and tangible reality and gear.

And away we go:

FRONT BURNER

— DR FRANK LIVE AT THE COURT TAVERN: We announced the release of this 3 song 33 RPM flexi and opened “dibs” for it on Monday and I did a big write up on Medium explaining the ins and outs of it. There was a video on Wednesday (for Odin) with some “minor secrets.” The release date of the digital version was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, but as of Weakly Reader press time, it doesn’t seem to have showed up on any of the services yet. (The Orchard, you had one job…) It’ll turn up eventually. They usually do. And I’ll let you know when it does.

Meanwhile here’s a little dyspeptic essay on the “just now” pseudo-chronological marker and how our misguidedly vague and scattered information infrastructure which can’t even mark things with the proper time, or schedule or organize its way out of the paper bag it has likely had a hand in banning, will likely be our ruin. The flexi is the real one anyway. Sign up for “dibs” if you haven’t already: if everyone currently on the list buys one when ordering goes live that will be 100% of the stock kicked, but people do drop off and when they do they get replaced by new names — so that’s the way to do it.

— Mtx forever: voting is still open, but we will soon be moving to the next phase, so if you haven’t already done so and would like to weigh in, now would be an excellent time. (Full details here.)

MTX A GO-GO

— MTX themed Valentines from Lauren.

— An MTX Road to Ruin “tour edition” copy in the wild. Seventy-five bucks! There were, they say, only 300 of these made and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen one.

— and, your Friday morning “…Hitler…”, from our buddy Pete and wife this time. YouTube vid. Nicely done. (More such covers may be found on this playlist.)

THEY CALL ME (DR FRANK) THEY CALL ME DR FRANK…

— Dr Frank — “The Grooviest Girl in the World”, live at the Court Tavern, New Brunswick NJ, June 9, 2018. From the Sounds Radical flexi single RAD-012–7F DR FRANK LIVE AT THE COURT TAVERN. Video on YouTube.

— “minor secrets” of Dr Frank — “The Grooviest Girl in the World” revealed.

— As you know, the songs on the flexi were recorded and mixed by Lauren Banjo from a show I did in New Jersey and it’s her first official credit. She really is good at what she does. Here’s her announcement.

— As a Valentine’s Day thing, if thing is the word I want, Sounds Rad offered 30% off all the available Dr Frank items on the site. It was just for the one day, so you’ve missed it now, but you can still check out the stuff if you want, at our Everyday Low Prices. (No hootenanny shenanigans at Sounds Rad, and that’s a promise.)

— Mistye and me in a furry heart frame with set list.

— The St. Valentine’s Day Internet Dystopia Free Speech Steel Panther Pussy Melter Saga: an update, and the feel-good story of the week.

— minds and me: the problem with broken links on minds.com has flared up again. (e.g., the link I posted to my Gymslips Vinyl Collector post returned a “couldn’t load content” error message for people not logged-in to the minds network; but then, at odd times, it would load.) I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it and while I’m not 100% certain, I believe that at least some of the problem as currently manifest lies in the fact that this content was originally posted on a “group.” The question is whether content from groups should or should not be shareable, and thus whether or not the broken links are a bug or a feature. Everyone on the help and support forum seems to have strong feelings on this matter on either side, but no one, not even the minds admins, seem to know for sure which is the intended way for it to function. Evidently it is going to be “fixed” but I don’t know if that means making such links always work or always appear broken. All I want is consistency so I know to avoid the stuff that doesn’t work. (I could show you the post from the help and support group in which some of this is discussed, but, ironically or not, that link is itself unsharable outside the logged in network! But the link is here, for those who have a minds account and want to log in and see it.)

We’ll see what happens, if anything. In the meantime, it seems that best practices are to share content only from my main page. That fails sometimes too, but at least it avoids the group problem, if that’s what it is. If you ever encounter one of these failed links, you can always go to my main page and scroll-search. I’ve never known that to fail.

Minds is still young, and quite buggy, but it is also the least censored and most straightforward of all the social media platforms and it is worth using and supporting for that alone. As it gets better, it will get better. I post everything there first, plus some extra, so if you want the whole picture that is where to go. Sign up here.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC

— Pet Shop Boys — “On Social Media”: this is pleasant enough, well written with some fun rhymes, and the video is visually / graphically clever, but if it is, as it seems, intended as a satirical skewering of its subject — well, it seems far too gentle a treatment for something that is destroying civilization and eating away like a ravenous serpent at the very soul of Man. More vitriol next time please.

— Good morning, world: Lee Dowell — “Don’t Make Me Mad” (theme from Teenage Gang Debs).

— punknews.org reviews the Brony-culture themed Clop ‘til You Drop cassette album by Big Moose Manholington. My comment was “the line between ‘not good’ and ‘interesting enough to merit attention’ can be exceedingly fine, such that the attempt to dance around it sometimes takes eight paragraphs,” to which the man himself responded with: “don’t bust my clops!” Fair enough. Never have I seen a negative review that made me so interested in checking out the material in question. And I have to say, it’s like nothing else ever experienced, and you might think so too.

FEAST YOUR EYES

— Items: Auer’s Allegory of Medical Science; at cat named Chesterton; Apollonia of Alexandria; the ultimate bummer of the world; caged; I couldn’t find a good picture of Saint Scholastica, so I posted this photo of a doll in the rain I saw on the way to church instead; As Good as Married; how to write love letters; property of Nomads; You Alone; Adam and Eve, I think; sometimes the old ways are best; Vertigo.

IN THE NEWS

— A rather hilarious Stasi field guide to youth sub-cultures, ca. 1985. DDR punks must have been something of a different breed.

— A turn-signal violation stop at an Arizona Motel 6 turns into a shocking spectacle of abuse and genital torture, all caught on camera but not released till now. The guy has filed a lawsuit he will definitely win, if it’s not settled, and it turns out this psycho cop has been on the loose for over a year since the incident. In a minor aside, why do police officers scream obscenities at citizens while conducting routine duties. They sound dangerous, and insane, which, it seems many of them are. There are some comments here.