New Episode of Found *NSYNC Fan Fiction

A new episode is up of the podcast I do with my friend Sacha called Found *NSYNC Fan Fiction, where we chronologically read aloud pages of one author's *NSYNC fan fiction, from a binder found at a thrift store in Chicago. We have not read ahead, so you're experiencing each page with us IN REAL TIME.

You can listen to it here on our podbean site, or here on i-Tunes.

In this episode, we learn shocking news that threatens to change the lives of Joey, the narrator, and the narrator's family at home during the*NSYNC tour, which brings the tension between them to a head. Alyson Hannigan makes a cameo (as in Willow from Buffy), as do Joey's parents. We drink ten year old Limoncello while Sacha accompanies the reading on a Casio keyboard, which somehow magically evolves the podcast into a radio soap opera. As usual, there's plenty of weird accents, snickering and snarky asides, while we try to just, really, hold it together without losing our shit entirely. I suggest listening to this episode on headphones so you can hear the piano better. And hey! It's free!

We ask: WHO KNOWS? THE JOEY FATONE KNOWS!

Found *NSYNC Fan Fiction #7 (A Ray of Blight Mini-Episode) now available

My most recent offering is the next episode of the podcast I do with my friend Sacha at rayofblight.podbean.com. We chronologically read aloud pages of one author's NSYNC fan fiction, from a binder found at a thrift store in Chicago. We have not read ahead, so you're experiencing each page with us IN REAL TIME.

In the most recent episode, the narrator Kelly goes with the band to a meet and greet (where she is seated next to Britney Spears), followed by a tearful call home. We experiment with using a variety of accents while drinking from a bottle of questionable ten year old Caravella Orangecello found at my house.

Listen to it here, as well as find a link there to listening/subscribing on i-tunes.

"Previously On" Parodies I Made: Twin Peaks, Battlestar Galactica & Glee

So there's part of me that thinks that all I'm really capable of doing creatively is either a) making fun of things and/or b) making parodies of things. In some ways, I'm like a shitty critic who can't actually write original material but can totally make fun of other people's material. Shame on me! But then there's another part of me (perhaps a part of me that rationalizes things) that feels in making fun of a thing, or parodying it, I'm synergystically creating something new. Sometimes also, the parody comes from a place of appreciation for the source material. This push and pull negotiates territorial control in my brain and sometimes the "make fun of" wins over the "synergystically creating something new" or vice-versa.

On the entertainment podcast Ray of Blight I do with my friend Sacha, we do a segment called *NSYNC Fan Fiction, which is basically us reading aloud from a binder full of some anonymous girl's *NSYNC fan fiction that our friend found at a thrift store here in Chicago. Before we start the reading though, there's a recap of what's happened previously on *NSYNC Fan Fiction. At some point I started making these recap segments into parodies of "previously on" segments from television shows I enjoy. It amuses me that I could take these unrelated things like a boy band from the early aughts and shows like Twin Peaks or Battlestar Galactica and tie them in together. That stimulates the part of my pop culture psychic third eye consciousness that thrives on a good mash up. Edited lunacy, the best kind, especially when there's a poetry that evolves from the pairing of two opposites. Sometimes a hilarious poetry evolves from pairing two things, like when you're reading multiple books at one time and they start to fuse in your head, and then you start drawing awesome connections.

But I flatter myself that my edited lunacy is in any way poetic; sometimes the Weird Al part of my brain wins over the Greil Marcus part of my brain. Occasionally however, I can't separate the two, and those are my favorite moments.

So here are the recaps, in descending starting with the most recent.  I hope you like them!

Found NSYNC Fan Fiction #5 Now Available For Listening at Podbean and I-Tunes

I do a podcast with my friend Sacha called Ray of Blight and one of the segments is us reading from a binder full of found NSYNC fan fiction, which our friend Sarah found a thrift store.

NSYNC Fan Fiction started out as its own segment on Ray of Blight, but it has now been given its own life. All for you (and for us because we enjoy it so), here's what we do on each episode: we chronologically read aloud pages of one author's NSYNC fan fiction, from a binder found at a thrift store in Chicago. We have not read ahead, so you're experiencing each page with us IN REAL TIME.

You can download it for free on i-Tunes (and subscribe to it there too) or listen/stream/download it on Podbean.

Also! I've been blogging at the Chicago chapter blog for Dance Dance Party Party here. It's a one hour dance party I help run for ladies.

Ray of Blight #3 Celebrity Smells, Now Available For Your Listening Pleasure

The new episode of Ray of Blight is available. You can stream/listen to it by clicking on this link to podbean, and/or you can also download it on I-Tunes.

Ray of Blight is the podcast I do with one of my friends, and this episode focuses on celebrity fragrances. To collect fragrance samples we did a guerilla smell recon mission with the aid of index cards, plastic bags, a pen and a whole lot of giggling. Also, we have another installment of *NSYNC Fan Fiction, as well as Oops I Did It Again performed karaoke-style with lyrics transcribed by Google Voice Mail. Then we got an equipment upgrade!

A small sampling of relevant subtopics, as discussed: Britney Spears' Radiance and inner death, celebrity dust and genetics, drum and bass notes, the many extremes of Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift's eyes, Everybody Wang Chunging, Perfume the movie, Faith Hill and synthetic grapefruit crossover fruit smell, boring ladies named Heidi, Paris vs Perez, Alicia Bridges, Beyonce, Justin Bieber's vulva-shaped fragrance bottle, soda suicide, Céline Dion, Seal's forehead, celebrity perfume marketing, Lady Gaga, a drop of blood and a femur from Angelina Jolie, The Flame by Cheap Trick, The Dollhouse, Jennifer Lopez's Love & Light vs Love & Glamour, SJP mannishly horsin' around with Matthew Broderick, Crazy Train, confusing John Candy with Usher, Innocuous by Phil Collins, Rihanna, the smell of plastic bags and index cards, Hilary Duff's Whipped With Love, spirit mother of Kohl's Daisy Fuentes, Mariah Carey's festive Tinkerbellian Perfume, bubble gum-ish body souffle, retail therapy, nightmares on Fantasy Island.

Go listen to it now! And we're on Facebook too if you want up to the minute news. You know, late breaking celebrity smell updates. Extra! Extra! This just in! The above picture is just a sampling of what took over my kitchen table for the project.

New Episode of Ray of Blight Podcast Available For Your Listening Pleasure

The second episode of the pop music podcast I do with Sacha Mullin called "Ray of Blight" is up! It's available at podbean and I-Tunes for streaming or downloading as a you see fit, and of course it's free.

This week we talk about the surreal musical releases offered by actors.

A small sampling of relevant subtopics: Donna Summer, Molly Ringwald, David Hasselhoff, anonymous *Nsync fan fiction, Raise Your Voice staring Hilary Duff, Many Mamas, Many Papas, Esther Rolle, Drunk Text, Minnie Driver, Spotify, Hal featuring Gillian Anderson, Charlotte Rae and Friends, Don Johnson, Ken Nordine, The Alice in Wonderland TV Musical, Celebrity Vinyl by Tom Hamling, Melissa Joan Hart, Yentle, Britney Spears, Jewel Staite, Lindsay Lohan albums, Russell Crowe, You've Got the Touch, Maaya Sakamoto, The Brady Bunch Theme performed jazzy and majestic, Philip K. Dick, Ringo, Jack Wagner, a chocolate lab snout, HR Giger, celebrity classification, well rounded entertainers, The Golden Age of cinema, boy band archetypes, Venn diagrams and more.

(Can't find it on I-Tunes? Click here to go to podbean, then look to the right, scroll down a little, and there's an icon that says "subscribe with I-Tunes.")

Next Podcast Episode Uploaded and Reflections On It

So I uploaded the next episode of the Quimby's Bookstore podcast. This episode I interviewed Jon Kristiansen and Tara G. Warrior talking about their book Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries (Bazillion Points Publishers). Jon started Slayer Mag in Norway in 1985 and put out 20 issues over the span of 25 years. The zine covered a variety of extreme metal bands, including Emperor, Slayer, Kreator, Nihilist, Celtic Frost, Bathory, Cathedral, Entombed, Morbid, Napalm Death, and more. The Onion AV Club called founder Jon Kristiansen “one of the best primary sources for facts and stories about Mayhem, Varg, and what really happened back in the day." The Chicago Reader called this book "a chronicle of death and black metal at their births but also a personal coming-of-age story." It's an awesome 744 page hardcover with tons of pictures and reproduction pages from every issue, and there's even material from the precursor Live Wire zine. It's also part memoir. Co-editor Tara interviewed Jon all about his experiences with the zine, and then together they decided what to include.

When it came time for editing, it took me a lot of playing around with the volume since there were 3 people talking, and each of us had different volume. That was very time consuming. I also added some music in it, which I think helps, if you need some help understanding examples of the music. I also edited out anything that was redundant, like if we got interuptted and then had to start again, if one of us, if there was a long pause, and so on. And oh! Another reason I think it was important to include music snippets is because I have this feeling about reading about music without hearing the music -- it doesn't help m much if I don't hear the music. When I read music reviews, no matter how many adjectives you use and in what combination, nothing replaces actually hearing the music. Sure, you can give me an idea like "Sounds like this band" and so on. But even that isn't the same. It doesn't help that I neglected to say who the bands are. Well, I included songs by Bathory and one by Watain.

Also, I know that all the church burning and murder stuff had been covered in a variety of places, so although the conversation touched on some of that briefly, I tried to approach the interview from the angle of independent zine publishing. We talked for a nice long time, and I felt like we had a good vibe going.

I would have liked to record the actual event afterwards in order for putting that up on the podcast but I don't have a very good mic -- in fact, I just use the mic on my Macbook. That would never capture the people speaking at an event.

Something that was really refreshing was that occassionally the conversation would take these unexpectedly hilarious turns, things that were decideldy NOT metal, which I enjoyed, because that was sort of surreal but then also very normal, as if to remind the listener that we're really just three geeks in a basement at Quimby's. I had read that one of the reasons that Jon and Tara became such good friends is because of all the people that would write letters to Jon, she was the only person who brought up the Everely Brothers or something like that.

It’s available for your listening pleasure, in a variety of formats and places for you to stream or download, including a link to I-Tunes where you can subscribe to the podcast so you can hear every episode when they come out, and they're free.


Podcast: quimbys.podbean.com


Book available: quimbys.com

Podcast Adventures and the Importance of Cultural Documentation

I just finished the second episode of the Quimby's podcast! I really enjoyed doing all the work on it, from the interviewing the guests, to the digital editing, as well as kinda monologe-y stuff in the introduction and conclusion that was silly and fun, then splicing everything together. I even enjoyed some of the problem solving about the uploading. For the stuff I need a little help with, I have a date with an Apple one-to-one support rep tomorrow to help me, specifically with some questions that have been popping up about configuring the data upload process, mostly in reference to getting the podcast on I-Tunes. (Apple One-to-One, the best $99 I've ever spent ever, ever, ever). I did get the first episode approved/uploaded successfully to I-Tunes already, but I'm intentionally not drawing as much attention to the podcast on I-Tunes until I get all the details the way I want them there. Right now you can listen to the podcast and subscribe to it at quimbys.podbean.com for streaming live or downloading individual episodes. You can play it on your I-pod or computer. (The first episode is there to, where I interviewed Margaret Hicks, who wrote a book called Chicago Comedy: A Fairly Serious History.)

So for this second episode, I interviewed the authors of The Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats (Lake Claremont Press), Sgt. David J. Haynes of the Chicago Police Department and his partner-in-crime, blogger Christopher Garlington. They were fabulously entertaining and did an event for their book at Quimby's about 2 weeks ago. The book has outrageous stories from working cops, Chicago cop lore, recipes and a bunch of other fun stuff. The idea is that all the meals have to be under like $10.00 (or was it 5? I don't remember.) The book talks about all the regions of Chicago and suggests where to go and even comes with coupons. It's a lot of fun.

I was just ruminating about how ever since I can remember, as a kid up through now, I have enjoyed documenting things in written, audio and/or visual form. It might be a transcript of things that happened, it might be a set of photos from an event, or it might be a recording of something. What immediately springs to mind is how when I was a kid, I used to love, love, love recording sill things with my friends on a tape recorder then loving the playback too, mesmorized (and also tickled) by how we could create entertainment just by hitting record; as an adult I would say that hasn't changed much, except that instead of calling it "entertainment," I would upgrade "entertainment" to "art." But for the most part, I feel the same way about recording now: Turn on the record button! The performance and the documentation of it has started! This recording is a document of the moment! Of the event! Of the culture! Of the society! Of a moment in history! A summarization of all of history! Of humanity! At a place in time! As a summization of ALL time until now! A document of what we have evolved to! And as something universal about the human spirit and predicament! And so on! ...I think of when they flash the title of the movie American Movie right after Mark Borchardt says that he funds his movie by maxed out credit cards. The way Americans fund art! Debt! Art! Poverty is the existence of the artist! And so on! The point being, perhaps that what documentation is, at its best, is in some way an encapsulation of something in cultural history. P.S. Am I remembering the opening sequence of American Movie correctly?

In grade school I once recruited fellow classmates to read a transcript I made of a field trip we had taken. The teachers let me and my actors and actresses out of fourth period for a week! Then we performed it for all the other classes. In high school I remember forcing my friends to go out with me and pretend we were aliens documenting our findings (OK, that is pretty nerdy -- especially when I share this fact: I had just read all the Hitchhiker's Guide series). 20 years later, the third issue of my zine Caboose was mostly a transcription of a round table discussion with friends about the sociological intricacies of karaoke, our favorite pastime. And then a few years ago, I took photos of notable things my dad, a veterinarian, has had to surgically remove from animals. In Caboose #7: Britney Spears 101, I reproduced selections from my journal when I was sick. The idea wasto use it as a filter from which to view paralells in popular culture -- since when I was sick, Britney Spears was also making her way through a series of public meltdowns. In fact, just a few days ago I made a video specifically devoted to one evening's activity of Punk Rock Karaoke, which consisted of both video and photos, because I felt like somebody needed to do that before the awesomeness of the evening was swept away to the past. (A recording company that some of their karaoke versions they record and make them into actual karaoke files with graphics and they make their own videos?!! How much more awesome can that be?!!!)

I think it is both enjoyable and important to creatively process things I've watched, heard, read and otherwise consumed.

Isn't that what good journalists do? Just thinking aloud on that one.

Just recently, I had this idea for a recording series: So the Poet Laureat from 1997-2000 was Robert Pinsky. He founded The Favorite Poem Project, which recorded Americans reciting their favorite poems, but the catch was that it had to be a favorite poem you memorized. It couldn't just be someone reading it aloud -- you actually have to have it memorized. And it wasn't necessarily famous people doing it -- it was sort everyday people doing it, like insurance salesman who loves an Ashbery poem, to, among other things, show that Americans were fully capable of enjoying art. And they created this big database of it.

Well, I had an idea that's kind of a take on that. And it's this (stay with me here): I keep ending up in these social situations where I'm talking to someone about something and for whatever reason, they have some spiel that they've memorized from necessary repetitive recitation or just hearing something a  lot. Everybody I know has at least one of these types of things they've memorized, probably you too! Usually it's something you've memorized from some sort of blue collar job you've had -- for me, it's the consignment spiel I go into at work -- "So the 2 things I always tell people when they consign stuff is: 1.) Don't let more than 6 months go by without checking in on your zine or we may assume ownership and 2.) If any of your contact information changes, let us know so we can keep our records updated." I also have spiels I still remember from past jobs, like knife selling: "highly engineered thermo-resin material and made out of 4-40A grade steel!" You get the idea. For some people, whatever it is that they've memorized might not necessarily be work-related, it's just something they hear a lot, and they can deliver it in a super awesome impression which is always awesome. Last night, for example, we had a party and a guest did a hilarious (and spot on) impression of the voice on the intercom at the Village Thrift in her neighborhood. So my idea is to record people doing whatever their memorized spiel is. Everybody's got one. It's a cross between The Favorite Poem Project and Studs Terkel. What would I call it? Thoughts? Anyone? Anyone? Also, do you have something you've memorized and want to be included?

Or perhaps you want to take on this project? I'm pretty overcommitted as it is. I'd be happy record you recording someone else and present it back to you as some sort of statement about our humanity.