A PIZZA TEEN! Douche Bag Double-Feature Starring Guitar Center Employee Of The Month, Johnny DeMarco

Prior to taping, Johnny was wearing a LIGHT blue shirt, but...well...you know: scalp juice, man.

Essential Albums: The Church "Starfish" 1988

This is easily one of my favorite 3 albums, one I could play for a week on repeat. It's the sound of cold, late afternoons during the winter weekends of my last year of High School, broke, tired and stressed because I've got a ton of homework, but I've foolishly squandered my time driving around to record stores. Favorite tracks? "Lost" and "Hotel Womb."

Retrotech: The Vako Orchestron

Consider this a prequel to the Fairlight CMI post. The Orchestron was a competitor to the Mellotron in the mid-seventies, and a professional remodeling of the Mattel Optigon, a preexisting cheaply built toy. It used actual recordings of instruments and voices put onto continuous loops on celluloid discs (similar to "locked grooves" on record albums), and played them back using optical sound (the same as in a movie projector). In theory, it should have been an improvement over the Mellotron; that instrument used lengths of audio tape that timed out after seven seconds, so you couldn't sustain a note indefinitely as you could with the Orchestron. However, the bandwidth on these things were awful. The sound was thin, scratchy, and muddy. The smallest bit of dust on the celluloid would result in pops and clicks. Only 50 Orchestrons were made, and sold at $2,250 retail. I picked one up for $60 at a flea market in Oakland in 1996, having no idea what it was. It included four Orchestron discs and a couple Optigon discs. My bandmate reconditioned it for me, I kept it in my studio for a couple years but never recorded with it, then we sold it for $300 and split the profit. It's an incredibly cool gizmo, but who needs a trashy sounding 100-pound laminated particleboard box sitting around the house? While Kraftwerk were touring America on the 1975 Autobahn tour, they purchased an Orchestron and used it extensively in their next three albums (especially Radioactivity, their finest effort). Here's a guy demoing the instrument and playing some respective parts from those tunes.

Mister Rogers Absurdity

I've been on a quest to score a solid album of music performed by Johnny Costa, the jazz pianist who defined the sound of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. I checked around for some videos as well, and in doing so, I stumbled across this weird creation. Don't get me wrong. Fred Rogers is, I believe, one of the only entertainers whose efforts were genuinely deserving of a national holiday. He sincerely cared about children in way which most of us find difficult to trust as authentic for any number of reasons. He seemed too good to be true, and therefore, he became an easy, unfortunate target for endless parodies. The video below gets very close to crossing over into the realm of mean-spiritedness, but it never quite gets there for me. It's just weird enough, slow enough, and quiet enough to be enjoyably absurd. Kembrew McLeod, the video's creator, says the following: "Mister Rogers released a number of records in the 1960s and 1970s that contained weird segments that I sampled and collaged, mixing in drums, noises and a bass line from a band named Bedhead. I didn't rearrange Mister Rogers' sentences, so many of the things that sound out of context are also messed up in context ('you can never go down the drain,' for instance)."

PIZZA TEEN! Readers Poll Results

QUESTION: Favorite token black guy?

• Isaac, The Bartender 44%
• Lamar Latrell 44%
• Lando 11%
• Colin Powell 0%
• Garrett Morris 0%
• Rochester 0%
• Sammy Davis, Jr. 0%

Be sure to vote in the current poll!

Mother's Little Darlings: Part II

Deconstructing Furby

A PIZZA TEEN! Douche Bag Double-Feature Starring Jean-Michel Jarre

I wasn't content merely relegating these videos to the comments of Stexe's Fairlight post. I'm a fan of his albums Oxygene, Equinoxe, and Zoolook, but Jean-Michel Jarre's videos and promotional films are some of the grossest examples of so-pretentious-I-feel-the-need-to-kick-him-in-the-balls visuals ever generated. In both of the videos below, Jarre has all of the charm of The Shining's Danny Torrance while in his terror-induced emotional coma. A comment on youtube compared the first video to a shampoo advertisement, and I happen to agree. If you mute the sound and just concentrate of the visuals, the laugh factor goes WAY up. No one twirls his own knob like Jean-Michel, har dee har har. BONUS! Here he is in 1990 playing the "laserharp" for the amusement of the all-powerful Master Control Program, live from the top deck of Zark's command ship. This unusual musical device is fueled by pure, unchecked ego.