Spring greetings and thanks for being a subscriber to Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking. It’s been an excruciating few months and I hope everyone’s doing ok. Today I’m thinking of all the public servants at the Library of Congress, especially the folks in the Recorded Sound Research Center who were so helpful to me a year ago.
I’ve got several posts in progress that I plan to get out in the coming weeks, but I thought it might be time to share some updates.
First off, University of California Press is offering 40% off all titles for the month of May. A great chance to get Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything for cheap, or terrific books by my colleagues at Cornell. Check out Andrew Campana’s new Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, Roger Moseley’s prize-winning Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, Samantha Sheppard’s Sporting Blackness, or Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens.
Media Objects podcast
Speaking of my Media Studies colleagues, let me first give a plug for a project we’ve just finished with our friends at The World According to Sound.
Inspired by a big conference that we were set to hold in March 2020 (but because of the pandemic had to move online), we collaborated with the sound artists in WAtS to make a series of audio essays exploring a range of “media objects”— objects that store, transmit, or processing information — and the range of techniques that we use to study them. Our Media Objects podcast combines immersive audio design with the contributions of more than a dozen scholars. Check it out and tell your friends; it’s a great listen.
The six-episode series features audio essays on Extensions (the hoary McLuhan concept), Containers (our response), Buttons, Typewriters, and two concluding episodes on Artificial Intelligence, which we think is the most comprehensive audio doc on the subject to date. Stream the whole thing at Soundcloud, above, or the AI episodes here. It’s also on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and all the other podcatchers (search for Ways of Knowing).
interviews and reviews for Firesign
I’ve been on the air (or in the cloud) quite a bit the past couple of months. Here’s some links.
Next Sunday May 18, I’ll be on Peter Bakija’s Burning Airlines show on my great local radio station WRFI-FM. Should be around 4:00pm.
I was thrilled to be on the Arts Express program on New York’s Pacifica station WBAI-FM (where David Ossman got his start). They included lots of great clips from the Firesign albums, so this is an especially great listen. Arts Express is an anthology program, so my interview was split across two shows (part 1 here and part 2 here). If you want to hear just my bits, the producer posted them on his blog here and here.
Tim Riley — who wrote a massive John Lennon biography and another well regarded book on the Beatles — had me on his podcast to discuss the manifold Beatles-Firesign connections (though somehow we didn’t get to Paul is Dead). Audio and transcript here:
Lee Vinsel had me on his fantastic Science and Technology Studies podcast Peoples & Things. We recorded this way back in August and I was not on the top of my game, but Lee does a great interview and we geeked out when he told me that Louise Woodruff’s eerie Science Advancing Mankind statue from the Chicago 1933 World’s Fair (discussed in my chapter on I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus) had gone on to have a second life at his Illinois alma mater, Joliet Central High School, where it has been retitled Steelman.
Louise Woodruff's Science Advancing Mankind statue (1933) rebranded at the Steelman of Joliet Central High School And the first academic review of Firesign was just published in the journal Popular Music.
Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death
Lots of rare and archival Firesign recordings have been put up on Bandcamp over the last several years, and occasionally a studio release gets the Bandcamp treatment. A Rhino release, 1998’s Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death was the first Firesign album in thirteen years and the first that included Ossman since 1982. I remember very well my trepidation, as well as the discovery that this Y2K-themed release was so much better than could have been expected. The Bandcamp release is a remaster, and includes lots of outtakes, including a half-hour open reel that shows how the group wrote and improvised in the studio. Recommended.
reader photo (Mark Leviton)
I was hyped to get a letter and photo from Mark Leviton, who had kind things to say about my book even though I had discourteously failed to quote any of the big and important Firesign pieces he wrote for the UCLA Daily Bruin in the 1970s. It was terrific to connect with another key person from Firesignland. He sent along this great picture from the 1976 Papoon for President campaign, which I wrote about in my first post here on Substack last year. Thanks, Mark!
Not Insane '72
Hi and thanks for reading Giant Slide Nineteen Holes Underground Parking. This is my first foray onto Substack, which I hope won’t be too obvious.
what I’m reading
Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music
Like John Szwed’s classic book about Sun Ra, Space is the Place, this fantastic book is far larger than its ostensible subject — the British folk music revival. It combines snapshots of dozens of musicians from (Vashti Bunyan and Fairport Convention to Nick Drake, Gong, and Kate Bush) with a deeper literary and cultural history from which I am learning much. It’s also highly readable.Kenneth Fearing, The Crozart Story
I am slightly obsessed with this second-tier proletarian-late modernist poet turned fiction writer. Especially in his fiction (but also his poetry, see “Jack Knuckles Falters”), Fearing is fascinated by new media technologies. His one masterpiece is the novel The Big Clock, which is a riff on the Henry Luce Time-Life era of magazine publishing that is far-seeing enough to predict today’s culture of algorithms and platforms. His last novel, The Crozart Story, is less successful but its central idea is equally fascinating. It suggests (pseudonymously) that the Red Scare was entirely the invention of a New York public relations firm, and its plot circulates around a power struggle as the company decides what their next big political project should be. In his New and Selected Poems in 1956, Fearing’s introduction begins: “The revolution that calls itself the Investigation had its rise in the theaters of communication.”1
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
This book made a huge impression on me when I read it in the eighties, and it has been fascinating to see the many ways people are discovering that our current culture of the broligarchs was anticipated in this classic graphic novel. Vide Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest as a biography of Adrian Veidt.
Tommy Chong, Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography
What a career. More on this soon.
Kenneth Fearing, “Reading, Writing, and the Rackets,” New and Selected Poems (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1956) ix.