Monday, March 31, 2008
AL QAEDA DEBUNKS 911 CONSPIRACY THEORIES
9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says
"...TALKING TO YOU IS LIKE TALKING TO A GOAT" !!!
BUSH HEARS THE FIRST AMENDMENT EXERCISED !
KIND OF MIXED - A FEW LOUD BOOS SOME CHEERS, BUT HE IS BY FAR THE THE BEST BASEBALL THROWING PRESIDENT EVER !
KEITH RICHARDS LIKES TO GET HIGH ???
CIGARETTE perched out of the corner of his mouth, he has wowed stadiums with his guitar playing for years.
But Rolling Stone Keith Richards reckons most of his life has been lost in a haze of smoke.
And the rock ’n’ roll survivor admits he still likes to get stoned out of his mind on cannabis.
“Keef”, whose career has been awash with drugs, confesses: “I smoke my head off. I smoke weed all the damn time. There, you’ve got it.
“But that’s my benign weed. That’s all I take, that’s all I do.
“But I do smoke and I’ve got some really good hash.”
Keith and Stones singer Mick Jagger were famously arrested in 1967 when police raided Richards’ country home in Sussex.
‘ The drugs? They were great. Drugs now? I'm on medication. Drugs . . . wonderful things, I don't see anything . . . it's a very dodgy subject ’
The former heroin addict was criticised when he breached the newly imposed smoking ban by lighting up a cigarette on stage during a gig at London’s O2 Arena last August.
He responded by EATING a fag on stage at a Stones show a few days later.
Hitting out at the controversial ban, he said: “It’s a drag because you’ve got to freeze your balls off to light a cigarette, you’ve got to go outside.
“It’s draconian – socially, politically-correct bulls***. That’s what it is. They’ll get over it.
“It’s like prohibition, they tried to stop booze once. Ha, look what happened. It ruined America.”
Keith goes on to reveal he SPITS at Stones drummer Charlie Watts on stage if he can’t keep up his interest on the show. And Charlie has confirmed: “He does – so it’s good for him not to get bored!”
Keith is writing his life story – but unsurprisingly finds racking his brain difficult.
And maybe it’s not just the drugs. He underwent brain surgery in 2006 after he suffered head injuries falling out of a tree on the island of Fiji.
Mick Jagger is said to have had memory problems too. He once handed back a seven-figure advance for his autobiography, claiming he couldn’t remember much of significance.
Keith admits: “I can’t even remember yesterday. I’m trying to put together an autobiography and it’s coming along.
“You have to drag things out of your memory. Some of it you don’t even want to remember and others you’ve totally forgotten, so you end up trying to put your life together again.
“And since I didn’t keep a diary it’s a bit difficult.
“It’s a little bit like life, really. Some of it’s a little bit painful and some of it you go, ‘Yeah, I forgot about that, or that was great’.
“But it’s reviewing yourself and that’s not my habit.”
So do the Stones talk when they’re not on the road?
Hellraiser Keith says: “Not a lot really, probably once a year.
“A few faxes, notes here and there. If you’re stuck on the road for two and a half years together you’ve said just about everything you’ve got to say to each other.
“Faxes are as far as I get, then you can do drawings – you can express yourself. It’s like getting a letter.
“I never need to be in touch with people that immediately. I really despise gossip.
‘ I hate phones. I have nothing to do with them. I don't even have a mobile phone. ’
When the band are not on tour or recording Keith admits he does very little.
He says: “I tell you what I do when I’m not working with The Stones, I kick back, baby.
“Go get a tan, lie on the beach. Wait for the tour to wear off. I’ve read every book ever written. I’m running out. Somebody please write one!”
Keith was speaking just days before Wednesday’s London premiere of the new Stones movie.
Shine A Light is directed by Oscar-winning film legend Martin Scorsese, who recorded the band over a two-day period at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2006.
Footage from the shows is intercut with backstage shots, archive material and new interviews.
Keith says of the old footage: “It’s kind of strange when you go back – you know, Mick with that cute little smile.
“It’s a strange thing in a way because it’s like your history and the strange thing is that we’ve grown up with everything being recorded. I mean, our whole life is basically either on film or on tape and you kind of get used to it.”
Of the movie with Goodfellas and Raging Bull director Scorsese, he said: “When they first said they wanted to shoot another movie of the Stones on stage I said forget about it.
“How many have we done? But then they said ‘by Martin Scorsese’ and of course the whole thing changed because this man makes movies.
“Once Martin was involved with it I just wanted him to do whatever it is he does.
“I wanted to stay out of the way and give him what he wanted, which was a Stones show.”
Asked if he was comfortable watching himself on screen, Keith adds: “By now, yeah. I got used to it. I liked me when I was younger.
“When you’re on stage we’re basically, as we say, in our office.
“We started off playing clubs. In fact, it took us a while to get out of them but small rooms have a different ambience to outdoors, and especially when there’s two million people you can’t quite see the end of.”
As he looks forward to his 65th birthday in December, the rocker insists the band have no thoughts of retiring.
“Give us a gig and we’ll play it,” he says.
“It’s what we do – it’s as natural as that.
“If I was a plumber I’d come around and fix your toilet. Sometimes if I can’t sleep I take the guitar to bed. We’re stuck. We’re melded.”
WORLDS OLDEST RECORDING - APRIL 10TH 1860 !
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The audio historian David Giovannoni with a recently discovered phonautogram that is among the earliest sound recordings.
Audio: 1860 recording:
The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of 'Au Clair de la Lune' (mp3)
1931:
An Audio Excerpt from a 1931 Recording of the Same Song (mp3)
The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology.
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.
David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.
Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.
“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.
But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.
The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.
Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.
In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
DAKOTA JOHNSON - CELEBRITY OFFSPRING
Dakota Johnson, 18, is the daughter of celebrity parents Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. The senior in high school has recently signed with IMG Models and has already landed her first job. She has been photographed personally by Andre Leon Talley for Vogue. Not bad for your first gig.
The young model is 5′9″ and made her first teen splash two years ago when she was chosen to be Miss Golden Globe. The blonde teen handed out the 2006 awards on national television. As a child, she had a small part in one of her mother’s films, Crazy in 1999.
For now, she’s back in Los Angeles, finishing up her last few months of school at New Roads, an alternative high school. She spent 30 days at Vision’s Teen Treatment Center at the end of 2007, reportedly for alcohol and drug issues. We’re not sure what part heredity plays in such things, but both of her parents have spent stints in other treatment facilities.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
WHAT IS THE TITS BUILDING ???
John Griggs Thompson, Graduate Research Professor, University of Florida, and Jacques Tits, Professor Emeritus, Collège de France, have been awarded the 2008 Abel Prize "for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory." In the prize citation, the Abel Committee writes that "Thompson revolutionized the theory of finite groups by proving extraordinarily deep theorems that laid the foundation for the complete classification of finite simple groups, one of the greatest achievements of twentieth century mathematics." In 1963, Thompson and Walter Feit proved that all nonabelian finite simple groups were of even order, work for which they both won the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the AMS in 1965. Thompson also won a Fields Medal in 1970. In the Abel citation for Tits, the committee writes that "Tits created a new and highly influential vision of groups as geometric objects. He introduced what is now known as a Tits building, which encodes in geometric terms the algebraic structure of linear groups." The committee noted the link between the two winners' work: "Tits’s geometric approach was essential in the study and realization of the sporadic groups, including the Monster." Tits received the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences in 1976, and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1993. The Abel Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics. The prize amount is 6,000,000 Norwegian kroner (over US$1,000,000). Thompson and Tits will receive their prize in a ceremony in Oslo on May 20, 2008. See the Abel Prize website for more information about the laureates, their work, and the prize.
Friday, March 28, 2008
YouTube Yobs - chase top video off the charts ???
YouTube yobs chase top video off the charts
By Stephen Hutcheon
The Italian blogger who uploaded what became the most watched YouTube video of all time says he decided to kill off his mega hit after he was subjected to a torrent of abuse from viewers on the Google-owned video sharing site.
The year-old video, which had been viewed over 100 million, was deleted from the YouTube servers last weekend by the Italian, who calls himself Clarus Bartel.
"I was fed up [with the abuse and accusations of statistical manipulation]," Bartel said in an email. "I am not interested in the first place if this is the price I have to pay."
The three minute clip was a home made video remix featuring the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS) and their song Music is My Hot Hot Sex .
According to the last published YouTube tally before it was deleted, the video had been watched 114, 281, 553 times since being uploaded last April.
Unusually, over 70 million of the views came this year in the month between February 17 and March 15, the day it was zapped.
On February 29, according to figures obtained from TubeMogul (see graph) , a video tracking site, Hot Hot Sex overtook Judson Laipply's Evolution Of Dance to become the most viewed YouTube video of all time.
Laipply's clip - which has now been viewed over 79 million times - had held the top spot for more than 18 months.
On March 7, YouTube removed the Hot Hot Sex video from the leaderboard pending an investigation into the unusual traffic spike.
"We don't condone efforts to affect the integrity of our video rankings or view counts," a YouTube spokesman told smh.com.au at the time. "We are looking into this matter and will take appropriate action when we resolve the investigation."
On or about March 16, Bartel's video reappeared at the top of YouTube's all time most watched video leaderboard (see screen grab) but disappeared again shortly after.
YouTube has not given any insights into its investigations nor explained why the video briefly reappeared on the leaderboard after it had been deleted from the server by its creator.
Bartel said even after he disabled comments on the Hot Hot Sex video, he continued to receive "obnoxious" comments from YouTube users on his other videos.
"I was forced to continuously delete comments," he said. "[Finally], the only solution was to remove the video."
In an earlier interview with Los Angeles-based blogger Andy Baio , Bartel denied fiddling the video's viewer statistics.
"I barely know how to turn a computer on and off," he said. "Never would I have imagined that such an ugly video, made on a whim, would make it to the top of the charts."
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
WITH LYRICS LIKE THIS ITS NO WONDER !
From all the drugs the one I like more is music
From all the junks the one I need more is music
From all the boys the one I take home is music
From all the ladies the one I kiss is music (muah!)
Music is my boyfriend
Music is my girlfriend
Music is my dead end
Music is my imaginary friend
Music is my brother
Music is my great-grand-daughter
Music is my sister
Music is my favorite mistress
From all the shit the one I gotta buy is music
From all the jobs the one I choose is music
From all the drinks, I get drunk off music
From all the bitches the one I wanna be is music
Music is my beach house
Music is my hometown
Music is my king-size bed
Music's where I make my friends
Music is my hot hot bath
Music is my hot hot sex
Music is my back rub
My music is where I'd like you to touch
Claro-que-sim
Fui escoteira-mirim
Direto da escola, não
Não ia cheirar cola
Nem basquete, pebolim
O que eu gosto não é de graça
O que gosto não é farsa
Tem guitarra, bateria, computador saindo som
Alguns dizem que mais alto que um furacão (rhéum)
Perto dele eu podia sentir
Saía de seu olho e chegava em mim
Sentada do seu lado
Eu queria encostar
Faria o tigela até o sol raiar
Debaixo do lençol
Ele gemia em ré bemol
Fiquei tensa
Mas tava tudo bem
Ele é fodão, mas eu sei que eu sou também
By Stephen Hutcheon
The Italian blogger who uploaded what became the most watched YouTube video of all time says he decided to kill off his mega hit after he was subjected to a torrent of abuse from viewers on the Google-owned video sharing site.
The year-old video, which had been viewed over 100 million, was deleted from the YouTube servers last weekend by the Italian, who calls himself Clarus Bartel.
"I was fed up [with the abuse and accusations of statistical manipulation]," Bartel said in an email. "I am not interested in the first place if this is the price I have to pay."
The three minute clip was a home made video remix featuring the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS) and their song Music is My Hot Hot Sex .
According to the last published YouTube tally before it was deleted, the video had been watched 114, 281, 553 times since being uploaded last April.
Unusually, over 70 million of the views came this year in the month between February 17 and March 15, the day it was zapped.
On February 29, according to figures obtained from TubeMogul (see graph) , a video tracking site, Hot Hot Sex overtook Judson Laipply's Evolution Of Dance to become the most viewed YouTube video of all time.
Laipply's clip - which has now been viewed over 79 million times - had held the top spot for more than 18 months.
On March 7, YouTube removed the Hot Hot Sex video from the leaderboard pending an investigation into the unusual traffic spike.
"We don't condone efforts to affect the integrity of our video rankings or view counts," a YouTube spokesman told smh.com.au at the time. "We are looking into this matter and will take appropriate action when we resolve the investigation."
On or about March 16, Bartel's video reappeared at the top of YouTube's all time most watched video leaderboard (see screen grab) but disappeared again shortly after.
YouTube has not given any insights into its investigations nor explained why the video briefly reappeared on the leaderboard after it had been deleted from the server by its creator.
Bartel said even after he disabled comments on the Hot Hot Sex video, he continued to receive "obnoxious" comments from YouTube users on his other videos.
"I was forced to continuously delete comments," he said. "[Finally], the only solution was to remove the video."
In an earlier interview with Los Angeles-based blogger Andy Baio , Bartel denied fiddling the video's viewer statistics.
"I barely know how to turn a computer on and off," he said. "Never would I have imagined that such an ugly video, made on a whim, would make it to the top of the charts."
© 2007 The Sydney Morning Herald
WITH LYRICS LIKE THIS ITS NO WONDER !
From all the drugs the one I like more is music
From all the junks the one I need more is music
From all the boys the one I take home is music
From all the ladies the one I kiss is music (muah!)
Music is my boyfriend
Music is my girlfriend
Music is my dead end
Music is my imaginary friend
Music is my brother
Music is my great-grand-daughter
Music is my sister
Music is my favorite mistress
From all the shit the one I gotta buy is music
From all the jobs the one I choose is music
From all the drinks, I get drunk off music
From all the bitches the one I wanna be is music
Music is my beach house
Music is my hometown
Music is my king-size bed
Music's where I make my friends
Music is my hot hot bath
Music is my hot hot sex
Music is my back rub
My music is where I'd like you to touch
Claro-que-sim
Fui escoteira-mirim
Direto da escola, não
Não ia cheirar cola
Nem basquete, pebolim
O que eu gosto não é de graça
O que gosto não é farsa
Tem guitarra, bateria, computador saindo som
Alguns dizem que mais alto que um furacão (rhéum)
Perto dele eu podia sentir
Saía de seu olho e chegava em mim
Sentada do seu lado
Eu queria encostar
Faria o tigela até o sol raiar
Debaixo do lençol
Ele gemia em ré bemol
Fiquei tensa
Mas tava tudo bem
Ele é fodão, mas eu sei que eu sou também
SUPER SIZED (235LB) BALLERINAS ???
The first Scottish performance in the latest tour of a group of super-sized ballerinas has been held in Langholm.
The Russian Big Ballet company has one main entrance qualification - all its members must be over 17 stone (108kg).
The Dumfries and Galloway show was part of the second UK tour to be held by the alternative ballet group.
One section of the performance is a parody of popular classical ballets while the second part is performed to more contemporary music.
The current 16 female dancers weigh in at an average of 20 stone (127kg).
Prima ballerina Ekatarina Yurkova said one of the aims of the show was to prove that people with a fuller figure could dance well.
You definitely have to have a sense of humour to be in the Big Ballet but we still take our work very seriously
Tatyana Gladkaya
"We eat normal amounts of food and the same kind of food as everybody else - our size is in our genes," she said.
"We had the opportunity and, under one of the world's leading choreographers, we gained the ability and confidence to take to the stage and show that we are as good at professional dance as thin people."
Fellow dancer Tatyana Gladkaya said the company, which was set up 14 years ago, kept a light-hearted approach to its work.
"You definitely have to have a sense of humour to be in the Big Ballet but we still take our work very seriously," she said.
"Having said that, it's easy to do the splits with 120 kilos of down-force."
Dancer suspended
Preparations for the tour have not gone entirely smoothly with one of the troupe being suspended - for being too light.
Tatyana Gladkikh slipped below the 17-stone mark which was attributed to the extra work being put in during training and rehearsals.
However, after a period of rest, she was reinstated to the group last week in time for the tour.
The Big Ballet was at Langholm's Buccleuch Centre on Thursday night.
It moves on to Stirling on 3 April and Kilmarnock the day after.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
HO NO !!! NOT AGAIN ???
The revelation comes three weeks after Spitzer was outed as "Client-9" in a separate federal hooker probe involving the New Jersey-based Emperors Club VIP.
At the center of the new ring is Kristin "Billie" Davis, a busty bottle blonde who hails from a rough-and-tumble California trailer park. She has a reputation for hard-partying, shameless self-promotion and a rumored 10,000-name-long client list.
Davis' alleged multimillion-dollar empire was smashed by city vice cops as she made plans to skip town. Prosecutors say she netted some $2 million last year by pimping out ladies of the night for as much as $1,000 an hour through four Web sites.
They noted she has openly boasted of total earnings of $6 million, and has been in operation since at least 2004.
Davis, 32, pleaded not guilty to money laundering and promoting prostitution in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday and was held on $2-million bail. She faces 15 years in prison if convicted of running the ring, which also allegedly operated the Madison La A'mour and New York Body Miracle agencies.
THIS IS LIKE THAT MOVIE "GROUND HOG DAY" ELIOT KEEPS WAKING UP TO THE SAME SONG !
Hitting Rock Bottom
Spelunking for Rare Rock Books in the Bowels of the Pratt Library
One of the perks of working at Baltimore's Pratt Library is exploring the "red dot" books on the "first stack" - geographically the rock-bottom basement of the building, though the finds there are far from the bottom of the barrel. "Red dots" are basically older titles that have been relegated to storage from the above-level bookshelves either because they are dated or for space considerations. And what I like about the first stack is that this is where the old music and film books are, many being non-popular tomes about obscure subject matters (like early MTV music videos from the '80s or the history of American death ballads or 1960s Japanese experimental films). What's great about these older, out-of-sight titles in Pratt's subterranean jungle is that many are not just off the public racks but are also out-of-print (OOPs, as I call 'em) as well. So it's reassuring to know that Pratt has them archived for the discerning music and film scholars. They even have a book by the great music writer and New York Rocker founder Alan Betrock (Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound), whose books are all OOP (and all well worth tracking down).
Herein in a list of some of those rarities found in the belly of the books beast known as Pratt Central.
OOPs - There It Is!
San Francisco Nights: The Psychedelic Music Trip, 1965-1968
by Gene Sculatti and Davin Seay
This is one the best books on San Fran's '60s music scene, written by a cool author, Gene Sculatti. Sculatti is, in fact, author of the essential but out-of-print pop culture compendium The Catalog of Cool (now online and a title Pratt also owns in its Social Science & History Department!), so his cool creds are completely covered.
As one writer on The Internets observed, "Sculatti was actually there, was a fan, and kept note of all the trivia (and very detailed scrapbooks). So unlike many who rely on published sources or artist interviews, he is a firsthand observer. But also unlike many, he's not an old hippy, and doesn't care about sticking to the 'big names' (to him, the Mystery Trend is as important as the Grateful Dead), so his critical perspective is all the more valuable. Besides all that, you get facts on the pre-hippie SF music history, which you won't find elsewhere."
Skimming this book made me think how similar in tone it was to Mike Stax's Ugly Things magazine. In fact, the only other place many of the bands written about here turn up is in the pages of Ugly Things, where the obscure and forgotten are found and feted. For example, I learned all about Emperor Norton, the nutcase who inspired Emperor Norton Records and who personified the Frisco weird-with-a-beard image (he even kinda looked like Baltimore's own Vermin Supreme!). And they say rock music isn't educational!
This Ain't No Disco: The Story of CBGB (1988)
by Roman Kozak
If you've read Legs McNeil's punk oral history Please Kill Me, then you're already familiar with many of the bands and personalities covered in this great read. But whereas McNeil's history covered the whole movement in New York, London and Cleveland, Roman Kozak (a former Billboard magazine writer) focuses on just one club - THE club - where New York City's punk scene was born and blossomed: CBGB-OMFUG (Country BlueGrass Blues and Other Musics For Underground Gourmands). Reading it made me feel nostalgic for my music era, back in the late '70s and early '80s at Baltimore's Marble Bar. It made me understand how today's kids relate to the Ottobar as their cultural base. 
I especially liked passages in This Ain't No Disco (which should not be confused with the New Wave album covers book called This Ain't No Disco) talking about the bathrooms at CBGBs, where the men's room had a graffiti chart detailing sexual conquests and the ladies' room had a similar "rating" system (e.g., "Dee Dee has the biggest prick in NY"). That really struck home to me, given that the Marble Bar had the same scene going. There was even a peephole in the men's room where you could get more "intimate" in your interaction with the ladies room (which was filled with guys half the time anyway!).
My most famous memory of the Marble Bar bathroom was pissing right next to Huey Lewis, whose band the Newport News, played there in, like, 1980. I recall I used the toilet and Huey used the sink (hey, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go!). I did not wash my hands.
Back in the U.S.S.R.: The True Story of Rock in the USSR (1988)
by Artemy Troitsky
Back in the late '90s, I used to work with a Moldavian computer programmer (who was also a former car mechanic who never stopped singing the praises of Volvos!) who used to plop on his headphones and sing along to Russian rock music while coding away at his PC. Actually, I worked with three Russians at this computer company, including a very sexy (also very married) chain-smoking Russian woman named Natasha and a quiet Muscovite named Sergei. But Alex (or Dumina, as Natasha called him - I think it was Russian for "wood" and meant "dummy" in slang) was the only one who rocked out in his cubicle. One song in particular caught my ear, as Alex would sing - always off-key, mind you - "One way teekit, yeah yeah, one way teekit!" Across the aisle I'd shout, "What the hell are you listening to?" Wherein Alex would effuse, with a passion usually reserved for Volvos, about the band known as Time Machine (Mashina vremeni). I think he even made me a tape (yes, this was before iTunes and the uniformity of CD burning - even for computer techies). It was real 70s prog rock-ish, as I recall, like ELP or Yes. In fact, whenever I mention Time Machine to the young Russian exchange coeds who come into the library to check their e-mail, they giggle and say "Oh, is old group; is musics from '70s!"
Well, finally I found this book that mentioned Time Machine - the first print reference I've ever found! - as well as other Russian bands.
Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954-1988(1990)
by Timothy W. Ryback
The next day I found an even better tome, Rock Around the Bloc, Timothy W. Ryback's history of rock music in Communist Europe from the '50s to the '80s.
Besides the great write-up on Moscow's Time Machine, whose concerts were compared to the early days of Beatlemania, Ryback examines other Iron Curtain bands in detail, from East Germany to Hungary.
Digging out my Planetary Pebbles CDs, Surfbeat and Surfbeat 2, I found most of the "various subversives" bands discussed in Ryback's informative and detailed study, like Leningrad's Singing Guitars (Pojuschie Guitary), who formed in 1966 and were considered Russia's first real "rock" band, famously releasing the first USSR rock opera, "Orpheus And Eurydice," in 1975. And Prague's Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe (PPU), who were actually jailed by the Czech authorities in 1976 for "organized disturbance of the peace" after a performance and had to go underground. Future Czech president Václav Havel was a fan and got the band to reunite in 1997.
The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video (1984)
by Michael Shore
Subtitled "The Definitive Look at Visual Music from Elvis Presley - and Before - to Michael Jackson - and Beyond," this OOP rarity more than lives up to the hype. Nothing else comes close to analyzing the fledgling years of music video. Though MTV was hatched a scant three years (August 1, 1981, to be exact) before this book was published, it's amazingly spot on. No where else will you find as much detail on the USA Network's Night Flight or the early music video artists (Devo, Bowie, Tubes) and directors (like 10cc's Godley & Creme and Steve Barron, who did A-ha's "Take On me" as well as Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and Hayzi Fantyzee's "John Wayne Is Big Leggy"). But Michael Shore does more than just critique MTV music videos like a highbrow Beavis & Butthead - he studies the whole history of music and visuals, with special attention given to pioneers of experimental film like Oskar Fischinger, Bruce Conner "(Devo's "Mongoloid"), Chuck Statler, Disney's Fantasia, Panoram Soundies (a pre-Scopitones visual jukebox from the 1940s), Scopitones, Mike Nesmith of The Monkees (Elephant Parts), and so on. I liked this one so much I sought 'n bought a used copy from eBay.
Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed
by Kim Cooper and David Smay
OK, it's not OOP, but I also ran across this fairly obscure work from the geniuses behind the essential rock read Bubblegum Is the Naked Truth (not to mention the music fanzine Scram, which describes itself as "dedicated to rooting out the cashews in the bridge mix of unpopular culture"), Kim Cooper and David Smay. Cooper and Smay assembled reviews from various scenesters and zinesters, including people like comic artist Pete Bagge (a Raspberries fan - who knew?), psychedelic revivalist Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate), music-lovin' author George Pelecanos, cataloger-of-cool Gene Sculatti (who operates the Catalog of Cool website with Kim Cooper), Greg Shaw (Bomp), and a host of rabid music fans from what the editors call "Zinedom's First Wave."
At first skim-through it seemed all over the place, but as I read the alphabetical band entries (from the UK's Auteurs to ole Yankee Doodle dandy Warren Zevon), I saw the common thread running through the picks and raves: overlooked nuggets. Each artist or song or album highlighted is, in its own way, a still undiscovered gem - except by these discerning critics and fanboys/fangirls. Or as Barney Hoskyns (author/editor of Rock's Backpages: The Online Library of Rock & Roll) describes the effort, "Caprice is everything, and Scram's lost grooves are a music geek's very heaven. The zinester spirit of lauding the officially uncool lives on in this eminently dip-worthy collection."
I really liked seeing such obscurities as Japanese cutesy-artnoise rockers Ex-Girl (who I saw play at Baltimore's old Ottobar on Davis Street - now the Talking Head - and later featured on an episode of Atomic TV), French anomalie Michel Polnareff (before he plummetted to mediocrity in the late '70s, he was the French Todd Rundgren, a "peroxide poodle...with layers of baroque and continental weirdness" thrown in, who had Jimmy Page play guitar on his Euro hits), and even local stab-from-the-past, Maryland's Appaloosa, making an appearance for their 1969 self-titled debut LP. Klaatu, Vivian Stanshall, Martin Mull, Monty Python, Slim Gaillard, Emitt Rhodes and other oddballs and obscuros all fill the pages of this hard-to-put-down read.
One of the perks of working at Baltimore's Pratt Library is exploring the "red dot" books on the "first stack" - geographically the rock-bottom basement of the building, though the finds there are far from the bottom of the barrel. "Red dots" are basically older titles that have been relegated to storage from the above-level bookshelves either because they are dated or for space considerations. And what I like about the first stack is that this is where the old music and film books are, many being non-popular tomes about obscure subject matters (like early MTV music videos from the '80s or the history of American death ballads or 1960s Japanese experimental films). What's great about these older, out-of-sight titles in Pratt's subterranean jungle is that many are not just off the public racks but are also out-of-print (OOPs, as I call 'em) as well. So it's reassuring to know that Pratt has them archived for the discerning music and film scholars. They even have a book by the great music writer and New York Rocker founder Alan Betrock (Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound), whose books are all OOP (and all well worth tracking down).
Herein in a list of some of those rarities found in the belly of the books beast known as Pratt Central.
OOPs - There It Is!
San Francisco Nights: The Psychedelic Music Trip, 1965-1968
by Gene Sculatti and Davin Seay
This is one the best books on San Fran's '60s music scene, written by a cool author, Gene Sculatti. Sculatti is, in fact, author of the essential but out-of-print pop culture compendium The Catalog of Cool (now online and a title Pratt also owns in its Social Science & History Department!), so his cool creds are completely covered. 
As one writer on The Internets observed, "Sculatti was actually there, was a fan, and kept note of all the trivia (and very detailed scrapbooks). So unlike many who rely on published sources or artist interviews, he is a firsthand observer. But also unlike many, he's not an old hippy, and doesn't care about sticking to the 'big names' (to him, the Mystery Trend is as important as the Grateful Dead), so his critical perspective is all the more valuable. Besides all that, you get facts on the pre-hippie SF music history, which you won't find elsewhere."Skimming this book made me think how similar in tone it was to Mike Stax's Ugly Things magazine. In fact, the only other place many of the bands written about here turn up is in the pages of Ugly Things, where the obscure and forgotten are found and feted. For example, I learned all about Emperor Norton, the nutcase who inspired Emperor Norton Records and who personified the Frisco weird-with-a-beard image (he even kinda looked like Baltimore's own Vermin Supreme!). And they say rock music isn't educational!
This Ain't No Disco: The Story of CBGB (1988)
by Roman Kozak
If you've read Legs McNeil's punk oral history Please Kill Me, then you're already familiar with many of the bands and personalities covered in this great read. But whereas McNeil's history covered the whole movement in New York, London and Cleveland, Roman Kozak (a former Billboard magazine writer) focuses on just one club - THE club - where New York City's punk scene was born and blossomed: CBGB-OMFUG (Country BlueGrass Blues and Other Musics For Underground Gourmands). Reading it made me feel nostalgic for my music era, back in the late '70s and early '80s at Baltimore's Marble Bar. It made me understand how today's kids relate to the Ottobar as their cultural base. 
I especially liked passages in This Ain't No Disco (which should not be confused with the New Wave album covers book called This Ain't No Disco) talking about the bathrooms at CBGBs, where the men's room had a graffiti chart detailing sexual conquests and the ladies' room had a similar "rating" system (e.g., "Dee Dee has the biggest prick in NY"). That really struck home to me, given that the Marble Bar had the same scene going. There was even a peephole in the men's room where you could get more "intimate" in your interaction with the ladies room (which was filled with guys half the time anyway!). 
My most famous memory of the Marble Bar bathroom was pissing right next to Huey Lewis, whose band the Newport News, played there in, like, 1980. I recall I used the toilet and Huey used the sink (hey, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go!). I did not wash my hands.Back in the U.S.S.R.: The True Story of Rock in the USSR (1988)
by Artemy Troitsky
Back in the late '90s, I used to work with a Moldavian computer programmer (who was also a former car mechanic who never stopped singing the praises of Volvos!) who used to plop on his headphones and sing along to Russian rock music while coding away at his PC. Actually, I worked with three Russians at this computer company, including a very sexy (also very married) chain-smoking Russian woman named Natasha and a quiet Muscovite named Sergei. But Alex (or Dumina, as Natasha called him - I think it was Russian for "wood" and meant "dummy" in slang) was the only one who rocked out in his cubicle. One song in particular caught my ear, as Alex would sing - always off-key, mind you - "One way teekit, yeah yeah, one way teekit!" Across the aisle I'd shout, "What the hell are you listening to?" Wherein Alex would effuse, with a passion usually reserved for Volvos, about the band known as Time Machine (Mashina vremeni). I think he even made me a tape (yes, this was before iTunes and the uniformity of CD burning - even for computer techies). It was real 70s prog rock-ish, as I recall, like ELP or Yes. In fact, whenever I mention Time Machine to the young Russian exchange coeds who come into the library to check their e-mail, they giggle and say "Oh, is old group; is musics from '70s!"Well, finally I found this book that mentioned Time Machine - the first print reference I've ever found! - as well as other Russian bands.
Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954-1988(1990)
by Timothy W. Ryback
The next day I found an even better tome, Rock Around the Bloc, Timothy W. Ryback's history of rock music in Communist Europe from the '50s to the '80s.Besides the great write-up on Moscow's Time Machine, whose concerts were compared to the early days of Beatlemania, Ryback examines other Iron Curtain bands in detail, from East Germany to Hungary.
Digging out my Planetary Pebbles CDs, Surfbeat and Surfbeat 2, I found most of the "various subversives" bands discussed in Ryback's informative and detailed study, like Leningrad's Singing Guitars (Pojuschie Guitary), who formed in 1966 and were considered Russia's first real "rock" band, famously releasing the first USSR rock opera, "Orpheus And Eurydice," in 1975. And Prague's Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe (PPU), who were actually jailed by the Czech authorities in 1976 for "organized disturbance of the peace" after a performance and had to go underground. Future Czech president Václav Havel was a fan and got the band to reunite in 1997.
The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video (1984)
by Michael Shore
Subtitled "The Definitive Look at Visual Music from Elvis Presley - and Before - to Michael Jackson - and Beyond," this OOP rarity more than lives up to the hype. Nothing else comes close to analyzing the fledgling years of music video. Though MTV was hatched a scant three years (August 1, 1981, to be exact) before this book was published, it's amazingly spot on. No where else will you find as much detail on the USA Network's Night Flight or the early music video artists (Devo, Bowie, Tubes) and directors (like 10cc's Godley & Creme and Steve Barron, who did A-ha's "Take On me" as well as Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and Hayzi Fantyzee's "John Wayne Is Big Leggy"). But Michael Shore does more than just critique MTV music videos like a highbrow Beavis & Butthead - he studies the whole history of music and visuals, with special attention given to pioneers of experimental film like Oskar Fischinger, Bruce Conner "(Devo's "Mongoloid"), Chuck Statler, Disney's Fantasia, Panoram Soundies (a pre-Scopitones visual jukebox from the 1940s), Scopitones, Mike Nesmith of The Monkees (Elephant Parts), and so on. I liked this one so much I sought 'n bought a used copy from eBay.Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed
by Kim Cooper and David Smay
OK, it's not OOP, but I also ran across this fairly obscure work from the geniuses behind the essential rock read Bubblegum Is the Naked Truth (not to mention the music fanzine Scram, which describes itself as "dedicated to rooting out the cashews in the bridge mix of unpopular culture"), Kim Cooper and David Smay. Cooper and Smay assembled reviews from various scenesters and zinesters, including people like comic artist Pete Bagge (a Raspberries fan - who knew?), psychedelic revivalist Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate), music-lovin' author George Pelecanos, cataloger-of-cool Gene Sculatti (who operates the Catalog of Cool website with Kim Cooper), Greg Shaw (Bomp), and a host of rabid music fans from what the editors call "Zinedom's First Wave." At first skim-through it seemed all over the place, but as I read the alphabetical band entries (from the UK's Auteurs to ole Yankee Doodle dandy Warren Zevon), I saw the common thread running through the picks and raves: overlooked nuggets. Each artist or song or album highlighted is, in its own way, a still undiscovered gem - except by these discerning critics and fanboys/fangirls. Or as Barney Hoskyns (author/editor of Rock's Backpages: The Online Library of Rock & Roll) describes the effort, "Caprice is everything, and Scram's lost grooves are a music geek's very heaven. The zinester spirit of lauding the officially uncool lives on in this eminently dip-worthy collection."
I really liked seeing such obscurities as Japanese cutesy-artnoise rockers Ex-Girl (who I saw play at Baltimore's old Ottobar on Davis Street - now the Talking Head - and later featured on an episode of Atomic TV), French anomalie Michel Polnareff (before he plummetted to mediocrity in the late '70s, he was the French Todd Rundgren, a "peroxide poodle...with layers of baroque and continental weirdness" thrown in, who had Jimmy Page play guitar on his Euro hits), and even local stab-from-the-past, Maryland's Appaloosa, making an appearance for their 1969 self-titled debut LP. Klaatu, Vivian Stanshall, Martin Mull, Monty Python, Slim Gaillard, Emitt Rhodes and other oddballs and obscuros all fill the pages of this hard-to-put-down read.
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