TV News! Dept.

Ongoing goings on, going forward ...

 

 

 

"Where's Davy?" - The Monkees Head Dept.

This all started years back, with my dissatisfaction with the movie soundtrack album, which I loved (owning three copies at a time when it was harder to locate than a rhinocerous clitoris) but felt needed work - the kind of work Jack Nicholson put into that dizzying sound collage (heard here in unique mind-blowing stereo). It needed to be more like the movie. It needed to be continuous, like a movie. Above all, it needed to be a puzzling, disorienting trip; not a bag of odds and ends. It took much more work than I anticipated, and I suspect some of the stuff I put in will never get out - trapped in the black box.

Pre-digital effects (like this and the 2001 trip) were truly special

You can now play the album on an eternal loop, mirroring the structure of the movie - "and when you see the end in sight, the beginning might arrive." The theme of being trapped in a kind of Möbius Sunset Strip that twists through the movie is echoed even in the lyrics of the unused songs. "It's the end, the living end!" someone shouts at the beginning of California, as Peter sings "here I come, right back where I started from." Nesmith puts his characteristic spin on the Strip: "These things I think are new, I guess they're really old. It seems I've done 'em all before. Now I will go to someplace ... where things don't start just to end." That'll be Hollywood, mythical birthplace of the most fascinating and still misunderstood pop group. And Peter, who's always been the dummy, the idiot savant, sums up the frustration with Do I Have To Do This All Over Again, back on the wheel, stuck in the box ... puppets waking up from a dream - of being a boxer, a soldier, a musician, a suicide, a guru - into another dream ...

Although there are more songs on this version than the official release, it's a more intense listen, and it does justice to an intense movie; multi-layered, dreamlike, endlessly rich and deep. Fuck Kubrick. Grab your headphones and half an hour to yourself. Extra points for spotting the Firesign Theatre.

The James Joyce Connection (no, really, stick with it)

From an internet: "James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939) is considered a revolutionary masterpiece. Written over the course of nearly two decades, Joyce attempted to create a dreamlike state. Like the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, Joyce believed that history is cyclical. Finnegans Wake is modeled on this concept. The story is written in a circular structure with no beginning or end. In fact, the novel’s opening line is a fragment of a sentence from the novel’s closing line which was left unfinished. Due to the complicated and fluid nature of the novel, critics find it difficult to summarize the plot. The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories ..."

Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not. This concept can occur to, and be expressed artistically by, a bunch of super-smart Hollywood brats quite as well as any Literary Genius or 18c philostopher. "The novel does not have a single plot - instead, it has many stories", or, as Head puts it: "We hope you like our story, although there isn't one ... that is to say there's many ..." The protagonist in Finnegans Wake is referred to as HCE, which can be understood as Here Comes Everybody. In this Fractal Expansion the Head equivalent is Here We Come, or HWC. Here they come, and there they go.

Swim with the mermaids ...

Back cover supplied (above, struggling against white background) . 

Unused poster

Mental Health Dept. - Stress

Original artwork, run through a few filters.

WhatCulture:

Another wonderful group with only a single album to their name, British neo-psyche rockers, Stress, released their sole, self-titled record in 1990, but what a record it is!

Despite proving a commercial disappointment, the band were well-received critically, with comparisons drawn between themselves, Hendrix and The Beatles [eh? - Ed.].

Those comparisons are well-earned. Nothing feels forced here, and the core group of Wayne Binitie (lead vocals, guitar), Mitch Amachi Ogugua (bass) and Ian Mussington (drums) manage to reference those past greats without ever seeming to ape them.

The core trio are joined by a bewildering amount of players, including such notables as the wonderful Talvin Singh on tabla, Steve Byrd on guitar and Raf Mizraki on “various Turkish instruments.”

You may think that you've heard every variety that psychedelic rock has to offer, but Stress really do bring something different to the table, not least a fine ear for melody, imaginative arrangements and an admirable width of musical vision.

 

Allmusic:

Well-done flower rock with a lot of musical strengths. It's laden with sitars, tablas, odd sounds, and melodies, though it doesn't resort to the tricks of nuevo-psychedelic [eh? - Ed.] music to get by.

 

IoF©:

Groovy, swell, you'll dig it!

 

If this sounds the sort of thing you might like (trust me, it is) you'll find the link in the comments. 

 

This Is Fantastic

 

The Only SMiLE You Need

Cover art ©FalseMemoryFoam Art Department Of Art Dept. - spot the source clues?

RE-UPPED. Read th' screed!

I could be wrong [horrors - Ed.] but I think this version gets lost in the avalanche of SMiLE reconstructions because it seems to take away more than it gives. Looking at the track list, there's nothing new here, only a slight re-shuffle, and it commits the cardinal crime of using any available source, rather than attempting an "authentic" contemporary reconstruction, which fans want but will never get. If you have the attention span, please read on, because there's a bullet-proof logic behind the process that resulted in thirty minutes of crystal holy bliss.

One of the many reasons for SMiLE's non-completion is not lack of content; it's the opposite. Brian was coming up with just too much material, finding it impossible to stay focused. Every SMiLE reconstruction has had the same problem. Coming up with a CD length reconstruction, leave alone a forty minute album, has meant trying to find a home for innumerable snippets and unfinished fragments that detract and distract.

The ground rules for this version are:

- No cartoon whimsy Brian at various times suggested it was going to be a comedy album, whatever that is, and this was one of the many distractions that became an unstoppable  shitstorm of ideas. So no I'm In Great Shape, He Gives Speeches, Barnyard, Vegetables or George Fell Into His French Horn skits. This is SMiLE as a work of art.

- No fragments of cover versions No Gee, I Wanna Be Around, You Are My Sunshine, The Old Master Painter ... Ask not why I cut them out, ask why they were ever included in the first place.

- No "elements suite" Another unfinished concept he was trying to shoe-horn in (or not, depending on who you read). It's an unnecessary complication. Fire never resolved itself into an actual piece of listenable music; it was always a big banging howling thrash that never fit anywhere without totally disrupting the flow. 

- Nothing from Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE A curiously sterile affair, with some material that just sounds ... wrong. Blue Hawaii? On A Holiday? The grotesque butchery of the Cool Cool Water section? What the actual? Overly academic, missing the (available) verse to Cabinessence, and completely devoid of the magic that saturates every note of the original recordings. Any bootleg build is preferable to this hollow replica.

So that's snipped a lot of tape, but we're still left with enough songs in a state of completion to constitute an album (the Beach Boys had form for half-hour albums).

Good Vibrations
Wind Chimes
Cabinessence
Wonderful
Roll Plymouth Rock
Heroes And Villains
Cool Cool Water
Surf's Up
Child Is Father To The Man
Our Prayer

This is the order (and the titles) I chose, and it makes no claim to be definitive. It is more coherent than other mixes, a suite flowing through developing movements.

Brian was so damn close to completing SMiLE. Much closer than he's generally given credit for. The biggest missing from the list was the verse to Roll Plymouth Rock, which Dae Lims brilliantly exhumed from a brief studio fragment (on YouTube, but I can't find it now). Why that didn't make the SMiLE box, or Brian Wilson Presents is baffling - the extraordinary melody is right there. The lyric was written. If Brian had spent another day on the song in the studio, and maybe a focused week in total, free of distractions, we'd have the album! But ... his life was complex. That he survived at all is something of a miracle.

I haven't been purist in my choice of sources. This isn't a historical document, and I've used whatever sounded good to me, which means the original recordings wherever possible, and the Surf's Up version of Surf's Up. Why not? It's The Beach Boys, fercrissakes, and the gap between SMiLE and the Surf's Up album dwindles to effectively nothing from the perspective of 2025.

Material is taken from the Beach Boys official catalog (any period), a little Dae Lims and SonicLovesNoise. My many edits and segués are exclusive to this version. Listen for in the late afternoon and tell me it's not the sweetest version of Wind Chimes you ever heard. Listen for the crows and the piano thump in the wide-screen Cabinessence. Listen, listen, listen ...

Cover references (to the overall mythology, not this particular edition):

Crow: flying over some corn (probably). From the Americana cornerstone, Cabinessence (I refuse to call such a majestic work 'Do You Like Worms').

Bicycle Rider: just see what you done!

Fire Chief hat

Leopard: from Smiley Smile's jungle

Sunflower: the first appearance of Cool, Cool Water

Chinese slave railroad labor

Capitol Building on fire! 

A little bit of surf 

Native Americans from Surf's Up

Choo-choo train

 

Jesus Explains Dept. - File Compression

 

Jesus delivers the Parable of the Suitcase (original Foam-O-Graph©, colorized)

When seeketh the humble pilgrim authoritative advice on file compression formats, to whom doth he turn? Why, to Jesus, because as the Son of God, verily doth he know his shit when it comes to this type thing.

Book O' Foam chapter XI verse IV: The Parable Of The Suitcase

So it came to pass that a man of Nazareth was sorely vexed by compressed music files, and came to Jesus saying, lo, for I am sorely vexed by compressed music files. Which shall be closer to God, the humble @CXCII of the honest yeoman, or the bloated flac file favored by the Roman Oppressor? And Jesus answered him, saying, When thou packeth thine suitcase, perhaps for business trip or vacation, and the lid will not close, what dost thou doeth? And the man replied, saying, why, I jumpeth up and down upon it until it closeth. And Jesus spoke, saying, Dost thou discard such garments that prevent its closure and travel without? And the man laughed, saying, why, that would be folly! And Jesus replied, saying, think therefore of the garments as music, and the suitcase as the file format. When thou compresseth the garments that thou mayest close the suitcase, thou dost not lose any of the garments. It is the same with music. And the man fell to his knees, crying, verily Lord Jesus thou doth knowest thine shit!

 

This post sponsored in part by Th' Pork Bend Pontifical Church And Car Wash Co.

 

 

Shining Paragons Of Uniqueness Dept. - The Third Ear Band

Whichever way you slice the Third Ear Band they look, sound, feel, and smell like nothing else. The boxes they don't tick spread across every musical genre. Wyrd Folk, you say? Didn't exist at the time. They haven't yet invented the box this band could tick with any confidence.

They're not going to play at your wedding. Unless it's at Stonehenge.

From '69, peak year for stuff like this. There wasn't any.

Putting band name on cover in shameless bid for show-biz acceptance and chart action.

They're possibly still out there, creaking and droning away, either in physical or ætheric form. Deliverable includes first three albums (xtry trx) and a massive compilation, but there's more! Shuffle on down to your nearest physical media outlet and scoop up a sack o' Thirdie goodness while you still have the strength!

Does anybody read this crap? Asking for a friend.

 

 

"Frank Zappa" (SWIDT?) Dept.

 

Quick! Your favorite Zappa quotes!

Artie Fishell's AI Fun! Dept.

Yes, AI is here to stay, and it'll only get better/worse! [writes TV's Artie Fishell - Ed.], so we might as well get some yoks out of it. The keen-eyed among you will have already spotted this is fake because the "Marine" is pushing "Trump's" big sloppy old ass onto a plane.

 

Artie Fishell, yestiddy

This is first in what promises to be a popliar regliar FoamFeaturette©. As to the contentious issue of AI-created "content" in the media, if you haven't learned by now to distrust every image that's fed you, and every word you read and hear, you will continue to be played for a patsy. Remember - only Foam-O-Graph© delivers the objective, un-spun truth! Look for the Foam-O-Graph© brand wherever visual content is present!