skip to main content
July 5, 2007
Frank Zappa - The Gigantic Spoken Word Project. Numerous volumes of a very large collection of Frank Zappa spoken word releases.
They consist of radio interviews and journalist reporter type personal interviews. During the radio interviews sometimes music was played as background or added before the broadcast in between questions and answers. Sometimes FZ acts as D.J., plays records from his collection and talks to the radio audience. But the main focus of this series is FZ interviews which to me is as interesting as his music. (Just a quick warning; the download mechanism is a tad annoying)
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 9:20 PM PST - 6 comments
White Stripes play Toronto YMCA The duo of
Meg and Jack White snuck in through the back entrance of an auditorium at a downtown YMCA in Toronto at about 3:30 p.m. Thursday for the latest in a cross-country barrage of small secret shows as part of their Canadian tour. During the short set, Jack pulled four of the children up to the makeshift stage to sing and show off the masks the campers had been creating before the arrival of the rock stars. In recent weeks the band has played on a bus in Winnipeg, at a bowling alley in Saskatoon and in a youth centre in Edmonton.
Previously.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:29 PM PST - 52 comments
"REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony" debuts tomorrow night in New York. South African composer Philip Miller listened to hundreds of hours of audio cassettes from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings - the testimonies of torture victims, as well as their torturers who were given pardon in exchange for their testimony - and composed music around the samples he selected. It premiered in Capetown in late 2006; utterly haunting excerpts available
here and
here.
posted by jbickers at 5:26 PM PST - 7 comments
"Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies."
posted by Gamblor at 11:40 AM PST - 78 comments
"I find it kind of funny to be hassled for using [them] when my intention is to free us from hassling people for using them." Thirty five years later, George Carlin's
seven dirty words still aren't forgotten by his
arresting officer.
"I couldn't believe my ears," Elmer Lenz remembers.
"I couldn't see why nobody was doing anything about it."
posted by miss lynnster at 11:13 AM PST - 37 comments
William Kamkwamba decided to build a windmill to power lights in his home: "For many years we had only paraffin candles to light my home at night. They are expensive, smoky, smelly and have to be purchased about 8 km from home."
posted by letitrain at 10:25 AM PST - 31 comments
Shingle Street is a tiny,
picturesque hamlet on the coast of Suffolk harbouring a big WW2 mystery: the best developed rumour is of an attempt by the Germans to invade Britain at this spot which was anticipated and intercepted by pumping fuel onto the sea surface and setting fire to it. UK files on the subject are closed, again mysteriously, until 2021. Ronald Ashford, who claims to have been an
eye witness, has a lot
more information. You can
stay.
posted by rongorongo at 10:10 AM PST - 17 comments
Dr Who - a guide to the totality of the Dr. Who universe online. Like the TARDIS itself, this post contains much [more inside].
via
posted by jonson at 8:41 AM PST - 117 comments
Previously featured on MetaFilter, "Free Energy" company
Steorn had scheduled a demonstration of their revolutionary, world-changing, physics-defying contraption Orbo to open today at London's
Kinetica Museum. But due to "intense heat" from camera lighting, their fake invention isn't working today. Here's the
live web feed of an empty box. Incidentally, it seems that the Steorn folks have allies in high -
very high - places.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 7:12 AM PST - 115 comments
Photographs of the dancers, actresses, cafe-life figures and prostitutes who were the subjects of Toulouse Lautrec's paintings, including such luminaries as
Sarah Bernhardt, "
La Goulue" (Louise Weber;
remember this?), and
Jane Avril, who was the model for
this last, iconic, Lautrec poster. View pages of the art matched up with photos,
here,
here, and
here, and
go to this page to rummage around in even more collections that include photos of Lautrec, his friends and family, street and location scenes, and lots of other tidbits.
[Spanish language site; NUDITY]
posted by taz at 6:42 AM PST - 10 comments
