Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 03.01.2019

groovy stuff and Dewi Sant edition

Welcome to my world, the magical world of Dr Frank, where we don’t let the Internet Dystopia get us down. I did lots of typing this past week for some reason, so this is kind of long one. Anyhow, here it is. Bore da, dydd dewi sant hapus i chi.

FRONT BURNER

— Dr Frank Live at the Court Tavern update: the order link for the very limited, numbered, flexi version of this three song e.p. went out this week to people who signed up for the “dibs” list. After some predictably unexplained delays the digital verison finally showed up on all the “services,” e.g. on Amazon.

UPDATE: there are a few more copies of the flexi available at Sounds Rad: get ’em while you can.

— New groovy Dr Frank stuff (Live at the Court Tavern “accessories,” basically) along with an array of other product now up on the Sounds Rad webstore.

— Dr Frank — “I Believe in You”, from the Sounds Radical flexi single RAD-012–7F DR FRANK LIVE AT THE COURT TAVERN. Video on YouTube.

— Minor secrets of “I Believe in You” revealed.

— Dr Frank — “The Grooviest Girl in the World”: here’s that video again, in case you missed it.

— Dr Frank Kepi Dan Janisch Kevin Seconds live at the Octopus Literary Salon, Oakland. March 29. Details here.

MTX MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA

— Minor Secrets of the MTX, part 12: the latest collection, plus a bit of updatage, featuring the minor secrets of: “Grooviest Girl in the World” “Dumb Little Band” “The Girl Who Still Lives at Home” “…and I Will Be with You” “Sex Offender”.

—An archivist’s life is not an happy one: (1) Julie Andrews, Henrietta Hippo, and more adventures in tape mis-labelling. It’s even bad if you’ve done it on purpose, as it turns out. (2) Mass confusion in the Alcatraz archive.

— Lauren Banjo has been our Balbumbassador for over a year now.

— Tom suggests we revive this classic MTX Songs about Girls shirt design. We have done it a few times before from time to time and may well do it again. (Nice KDATA box btw.)

— From our friend Vladimir:

The struggle continues.

— The Witzard revisits 1997’s Generations I compilation (“a punk look at human rights.”) Nearly everything about this release confuses me, not the least the fact that my band was on it and that the song was mysteriously re-titled. We re-collected that song on Shards vol. 1 btw: here.

— …and your Friday morning “She’s Coming (Over Tonight)”, from Rocky Rochelle (band camp link.) I post a cover every Friday. When they’re on YouTube I embed them here add them to this playlist.

DR FRANK CORNER

— King Dork Approximately added to Mr Smith’s middle school library. Finally. Balbum!

— Dr Frank — “Age of Intolerance”: reposted because it still keeps on not getting obsolete. I feel I could/should write a new verse every week…

— Dr Frank — “You You You”: reposted my fingerpicked cover of my own song because I was reminded it was originally posted one year ago. Got a few more of these up my sleeve but recording them is a bit daunting. Soon, soon.

— Dementia warning sign: it all becomes clear.

— Songwriting travails: in which I discover, after a great deal of anguish, that I have plagiarized a bit of my own song.

— Moral panic update: been reading Dorothy Rabinowitz’s No Crueler Tyrannies, which is about the daycare mass abuse hysteria of the ’80s. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this when I “process” it more fully, but it is remarkable how closely the rhetoric of then mirrors that of now. Whatever else you might say about moral panics, we never learn from them.

— The Bad Library: yet another post on our information dystopia and how a library with missing or hidden materials is a bad library, along with a quote from Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.

— note to self: never follow a link to goodreads….

— Snarking about Facebook’s donate-your-birthday racket led to this helpful essay from old comrade Jon von; whereas snarking about the iOS feature that ghost deletes your apps making you download them again every time you want to use them led to this: there’s a apparently a setting where you can switch this to “off” but it doesn’t happen to appear on my phone.

— Department of bon mots: “Nothing exceeds like excess”; “When did everyone decide to turn back the clock, so to speak, on the civilizational achievement of chronological order…”.

— Joe Rogan and Alex Jones: astonishing how this can be entertaining for four hours and forty minutes but somehow it was.

— minds channel update: the permissions bug popped up again this week (where certain minds links are inaccessible to anyone not logged in to the minds site.) As usual it can be tough to sort out the bug vs. feature situation (and to judge from my inquiries to help groups there are definitely people out there who see broken links outside the walled garden as a feature, it takes all kinds…) Anyhow, as it currently stands, as far as I can tell, the bugs have been fixed and what you get when you click a minds link is proper display of the content with a dismissable pop-up overlay window with the options to log in, join, or “not now.” Not sure it won’t happen again. As I’ve said before (scroll down to “minds and me), minds is young and buggy, but steadily improving and worth sticking with. Here’s my channel. Here’s a referral link if you want to sign up for your own account.

In other minds news, I’ve been trying to understand the parameters of the minds Explicit / Mature tag, and whether or how it applies to art and, you, know, photography and kitsch, the basic stuff I like. The answer is, apparently, that there is no further definition than the brief, vague terms of service line. I’m glad to know there’s no penalty for guessing wrong in when to apply the tag. But it seems like best practices are to tag any image depicting any person not fully clothed as explicit and mature. I’m good as long as I know the rules. So welcome to my explicit very mature, very adult, night-time world.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC

— Appreciating Sex Pistols singles on the minds Vinyl Collector group. I collected these long, long ago and I’m glad I still have them.

— Bobby Bare — “Numbers”: I cover this and a couple other Bobby Bare songs from time to time, and when I do everyone always thinks it’s one of mine. Learned from the best…

— Chick Willis — “Mother Fuyer”: The use of “mother fuyer” in blues recording goes back a lot further than the mid-40s Dirty Red tune that this is a sort of cover of. I like Dirty Red’s rendition a lot but you really can’t beat this 70s jukebox revival of it by the great Chick Willis — the b side of the famous (also great) “Stoop Down Baby.” (That tongue-in-cheek intro aside, I believe “fuyer” originated as a slurring of “for you.”) Not sure if should have “E”’d this, but I didn’t.

— Lynda Carter’s Rock ‘n Roll Fantasy. Thanks to Chris Thacker for unearthing this artefact.

— Good morning world: The GTOs — “Do Me in Once and I’ll Be Sad, Do Me in Twice and I’ll Know Better (Circular Circulation)”

PICTURE BOOK

— Look: buying records cheers me up; Satan’s Cheerleaders; when Dali met Raquel; her name was Olive; a tree in a man’s world; vinyl smells better; oh, Vergil.

— Mural Purposely Painted Upside Down to Reflect Right Side Up in the Water

IN THE NEWS

— Stanley Donen died. He made a great many very famous films, two of my favorites among them: Funny Face and Bedazzled.

— That British teenager convicted of posting hip hop lyrics in an Instagram post (a.k.a. “sending a grossly offensive message”) has had her conviction quashed on appeal, which is good news of course, but the situation remains ridiculous.

— And then they came for the knitters. This one is quite a yarn.