Tvindy

More Fun with Burger Chef [and Jeff]

Last year I posted the the sound file for a story I digitized from an old Burger Chef record. People have contacted me from time to time asking if I can e-mail them a copy, which I'm always happy to do. Donny was the latest person to take an interest in the sound file, and he was so grateful to receive it that he sent me two more Burger Chef record soundtracks. You can download all three here:

• The Ghost of Grizzly Mountain
• Fangburger's Haunted Hotel
• Cackleburger Casts a Spell

Bakerina's Music Meme 2

Remember Bakerina's Music Meme? Well, she's got a new one. (Technically it came from someone else, but no matter.) Just as I participated in the last one, I'll give this one a go:

What is the total amount of music files on your computer?

Looking at the properties for my my My Music folder, I see that I have 1118 files. Not all of them are music, but most are.

The CD you bought last?

That would be Thimble Corner.

What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Hmmm. . . Well, I can't remember. Usually I try to avoid music.

Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

• Twenty Fingers, "No Short Dick Man"
• South Park, "The Circle of Poo"
• Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Walk through the Fire"
• Raffi, "Baby Baluga"

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

I suppose I'm passing it to the first three people who read this and decide to take part.

---

On a completely unrelated not, if you need a text-based heart for your Valentine's Day posts and e-mails and don't feel like messing with the Windows character map, feel free to copy and paste these:

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Thimble Corner

When I was about four, my grandfather sent me and my brother a children's LP entitled Thimble Corner. When I was digitizing my old records this past summer, I did a quick check on Amazon to make sure it hadn't been released on CD and was astonished to see that it had. I'd checked before in previous years and never found even a mention of it anywhere online, nor had I ever met anyone who was familiar with it.

The record, including the voices and sound effects, was done entirely by two men -- Jim Copp and Ed Brown, and my copy was even autographed by Ed Brown, which must make it, if not valuable, then at least extremely rare.

As a child, I must have listened to the record dozens of times, although I'm not quite sure why. It definitely was not something I enjoyed. The stories struck me as somewhat ominous and disturbing. Bad and terrifying things happened, and even though everything always turns out okay in the end, I didn't have the impression that the endings were necessarily happy. In "The Carpenter and the Duck", for instance, that duck went through a horrific trauma, and at the end, he certainly does not sound at all happy.

I find that most of the records I listened to and books that I had read to me in my early childhood over and over again are like this. They contained a sinister aspect that only I seemed aware of. Since adults seemed completely oblivious to any of this, I assumed that I must be missing something, and so I would revisit such stories over and over again trying to figure out what I was misunderstanding.

I'm still a bit bothered by Thimble Corner. If you like, you can listen to it too and tell me what you think. It's my MP3 offering of the week. (Actually, it's in the iTunes format.) Unfortunately, I was unable to fit the eighth track into my dot Mac account, but all the others are there.

Weekly Music

This week's music tracks come from France. Many years ago I did a high school summer exchange in that kooky country. While there I made a point of watching the weekly top 20 television program, which played videos of the most popular songs of the week. Of course, most of them were American. But there were a few French hits sprinkled in. One day, the family I was living with took me on a trip to the supermarket, which they did about once a month. I came across the music section, which was full of 45s. (Yes, this was a few years ago.) Once again, most of them were American hits, but there were a few French ones. I bought one of each that I recognized from TV and took them home with me. (The family meanwhile, filled their shopping cart with about twenty bottles of red wine, since after all, it had to last a month.) A few months back, I digitized my French music. I suspect some of these songs are now very obscure. You can enjoy them here.

More MP3s

It's Tuesday again and time to share some more sound files. This is part 2 of last week's offering. These are the rest of the sound clips from old TV shows I watched as a child. I noticed the first batch didn't get any comments, but I hope people are still checking them out. I've put up some really good stuff.

You can download them here.

Tuesday's MP3s

It's been awhile since I did the weekly MP3, but I've decided to revive it. If I remember correctly, I was doing it on Tuesdays, and today is Tuesday, so here we go.

As I stated previously, I've discontinued the e-mail list, since I can now offer the files directly through my free trial Dot Mac account. So that's what I'll use for now (at least until it expires). If you're a regular reader, you know that I will soon be the proud owner of an iPod Photo and will therefore be giving my old iPod Mini to my brother for Christmas. For the past couple of years, I've been meaning to give him a CD with soundclips from the various television programs we watched together as children. I've downloaded quite a collection. Now I can load them all onto the iPod Mini before I give it to him. I can also share them with my readers.

Since I only get 25 megabytes in my trial Dot Mac account, I'll share half of the collection this week and the other half next week. Also, I apologize for the fact that the files are not all clearly (or even consistently) labeled, and many are in the iTunes format. Go here to download them.

More Fun with Apple

A couple weeks ago when I attended the Eugene Blogger Meetup, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow blogger. (Unfortunately I don't remember his name or blog, but it is very likely this one.) He mentioned the phenomenon of MP3 blogging with which I was utterly unfamiliar. This made me simultaneously proud of myself for having thought up and started my MP3 e-mail list without having been previously exposed to the idea and also ashamed that I had somehow missed the birth of a new trend.

He talked about the problem of file size, both in terms of the cost of keeping large MP3 files on a server and also the problem of limitations on bandwidth that can suddenly become a problem should an uploaded file prove to be popular. My solution was to write about a track in my blog and make it available to interested people through an e-mail list. Both Yahoo Mail and Gmail allow messages of up to 10 megabytes in size, so this is a good way to distribute most single MP3s. (It also makes it much harder for the RIAA to come after me.) Since Yahoo Mail is free, and I still have invites available to Gmail (does anyone want one?), no one is excluded.

The fellow I spoke to had taken a different route. He told me that he used a Dot Mac account to provide downloadable music files. With an account, you get 125 megabytes of filesharing space (plus another 125 for e-mail) with no limit on downloads. (A million people can download one of your MP3s without extra cost to you.) And even PC users can access the files. The service costs $100 a year, but you can get a free two-month trial with 25 megabytes of storage. Today I tested it out.

For some reason, I was under the impression that an account could only be established on an Apple computer. (According to Bill, No Apple user or even Apple fan would ever call the machine a MAC., so I'm calling it an Apple computer.) I went to a university computer lab and fooled around for awhile on an old iMac with a 6 gigabyte drive. It was quite slow and took even longer than a PC to boot. The interface was a bit confusing. I spent several minutes in the ironic position of being unable to find something called the "finder" that was necessary for setting up my account.

In the end, I finally got everything set up okay. I've got two months to play around with the system and see if it's something I want to subscribe to. I look forward to being able to offer some big downloads to my readers. In the meantime, mostly as a test, I've set up a page where you can download all the tracks I have offered on my MP3 mailing list over the past several weeks. Check it out here:

http://homepage.mac.com/tvindy/

Diabolical Melody

This week's MP3 is a famous Brazilian song called Sociedade Alternativa written by Raul Seixas in the seventies. Seixas was a major star in his time. His songs are a bit dated, but I still like to listen to them on occasion. For awhile I did all my jogging while listening to one of his tapes on my walkman. (Yes, I'm so old I remember the world back before MP3 players.)

Seixas had a friend named Paulo Coelho who helped him produce his music. Coelho later went on to become a bestselling author, whose most famous book is The Alchemist (sort of a cross between The Little Prince and The Celestine Prophecy).

A far less famous book by Coelho is The Valkyries, which I read soon after it was published in Brazil. It's all about about Coelho going on a spiritual quest in the Mojave desert to seek enlightenment and redemption. It's pretty standard fare for him, but I was more than a little shocked by this passage pertaining to Raul Seixas' "Sociedade Alternativa":

People wanted to know what was the Alternative Society.

"Just pay attention to the lyrics", he [Paulo Coelho] thought to himself. It wasn't a song -- it was a mantra of ritual magic, with the words of the Beast of the Apocalypse being read through it in a low voice. Whoever sang that song would be invoking the forces of Darkness. And everyone was singing it.

He and the partner [Raul Seixas] had already prepared everything. The royalties were being applied to the purchase of land near Rio de Janeiro. There, without the knowledge of the military government, they were recreating what, nearly a hundred years ago, the Beast had tried to do in Cefalu, in Sicily. But the Beast was expelled by the Italian authorities. It had erred on many points: it hadn't managed to get a sufficient number of disciples; it didn't know how to make money. It told everyone that its number was 666, that it had come to create a world where the strong would be served by the weak, and the only law would be to do whatever one wanted. But it didn't know how to properly spread its ideas -- few people took its words seriously.

He and his partner -- Raul Seixas -- well, this was something completely different! Whenever Raul would sing, the entire country listened. They were young, and they were making money. Yes, it was true that Brazil lived under a military dictatorship, but the government was concerned with guerrillas. It didn't waste its time with a singer of rock music; on the contrary -- the authorities thought that it kept the young people away from communism.

I was very surprised when I came across that passage. It was so unexpected. I already had a great deal of familiarity with that song and many others by Seixas, and it just didn't sound satanic. I've had many years to think about this, and my final conclusion is that Paulo Coelho is full of shit. He's a fairly good writer and definitely has his moments, but sometimes he's just full of shit. (I feel the same way about Mark Twain, by the way.)

Seixas is dead, so it's too late to ask him, but it seems pretty clear to me that the song is much more of a reaction to the military dictatorship, which was at the height of its power at the time the song was written. Freedom of speech did not exist, and artists in Brazil, including Seixas, were often faced with censorship and imprisonment. As a result, a great deal of art was produced in the seventies that sought to convey hidden messages that the censors might miss. (Cálice by Chico Buarque is a classic example of this phenomenon.) Sociedade Alternativa's lyrics speak of an alternative society where people are free to do whatever they want that makes them happy. Seems to me it's nothing more than a barely veiled criticism of a repressive government.

Coelho spoke of earning royalties from the song, so I really have to wonder if they were still in effect when he wrote "The Valkyries". I bet sales of Seixas' music went through the roof once the book was released, just as the book must have benefited by tying itself to the secret life of Seixas and one of his most popular songs.

Burger Chef & Jeff in "The Ghost of Grizzly Mountain"

Remember Burger Chef? Everyone thinks that McDonald's invented the Happy Meal, but they're really just copying the Burger Chef funmeal, which predated it by many years. The funmeals were cool, and, as with happy meals, they always included a toy surprise. Pictured above is a Burger Chef record, which came with someone's funmeal many years ago. (I don't know who, since I bought it on eBay.) I've digitized it, so now I can listen on my iPod to Burger Chef and Jeff in an epic adventure entitled "The Ghost of Grizzly Mountain". It's an interesting tale. Strangely, Jeff seems to be a composite of Robin (From Batman and Robin) and Shaggy (from Scooby-Doo). (What's even stranger is that both those characters are indirectly related, having been voiced by Casey Kasem.) If you want to know more about Burger Chef, go here.

As I do every week to conserve bandwidth, I'm sending the MP3 out via e-mail to people with Gmail or Yahoo account (since they accept large attachments) who have expressed a desire to receive the weekly audiotrack about which I blog. If you are interested, just let me know, and I'll add you to the list.

Music by Warren

It's time once again for my weekly music post. This is where I take some track from my music collection, blog about it, and share it with people via e-mail, sending it as an attachment to their gmail accounts. I always try to supply some related internet links for people not on the list, but this time the music is just too obscure. Sorry about that. Anyway, if you want to sign up to receive weekly music and don't have a gmail account, just let me know, and I'll be happy to send you a gmail invite.

Okay, here's the backstory. A few years back, I worked on and off for a non-profit that trained and sent volunteers to work in development projects in third world countries. I met a lot of fascinating people during this time. One was a musician named Warren. I never really got to know him very well, since I was arriving there soon after he had returned from a year-long stint in Mozambique. He was finishing up the program (which included a bit of follow-time back in the US), and, like many people at that stage, he just wasn't interested in meeting any new people like me.

For his close friends, he made a mix tape of various songs and pieces he had composed. I was completely unaware of the tape's existence until I discovered a copy many weeks later that had accidentally been left behind by one of his friends. Listening to it, I could see that he had talent, but I only listened to it a couple of times. After all, the tape hadn't been meant for me, I didn't know Warren very well at all, and I was also feeling a bit slighted at not having been given a copy. But I did make a point of holding on to it, and recently I digitized it, so I could preserve it in my music library.

Listening to it now, more than seven years later, I have a much greater appreciation for his music. What's really interesting for me is that it reflects his experiences and feelings while he was enrolled in the program, and it seems clear that different songs were written at different times, some in Mozambique and others after he was back in the US. Anyone who has done one of the programs can easily relate to the songs, but it's strange to experience it all expressed as music. Unfortunately, they were all recorded in his bedroom on a cheap tape recorder and not in a professional studio. Warren recorded eleven pieces in all (I use the word "piece", because a few were instrumental.), and I will share three of them with you.

The first is called "Kitchen Table" which is clearly about his life in Mozambique. I did once hear Warren remark that what was really strange there was that many of the people he met there, particularly the children, very much resembled people he had known in his old neighborhood, both in appearance and personality, constantly giving him the weird impression that he was actually back home in the US.

The second is "Together, My Friends" which has to do with getting together with friends one last time. Of course, this is something that happens several times to anyone who participates in one of those programs. First you say goodbye to people in other groups who leave for their assigned country before you leave. Although they will eventually come back, you know that you will miss their return, because you will be overseas. Then your group's time comes, and you leave behind friends you have made in more recent groups. Then you come back to the US, leaving yet more friends behind. And finally, the program comes to an end, and all the people who have been with you in your group right from the beginning all go their separate ways. I think this helps explain why, at the end, Warren didn't want to invest himself emotionally in any new people.

The final song, for which he named the collection, is entitled "Gotta Get outta Here". Warren actually didn't complete all of his assigned time back in the US. One night when it was very late, he just packed up his car and left. No one even knew he was gone until the next day. Incidentally, in the background you'll hear a lawnmower. The odds are very good that that was me; I was doing a great deal of yardwork during this period.

I have no idea what ever became of Warren, although I would hope that he's had a very successful musical career. I don't know anyone who's had any contact with him, and I don't remember where he is from or his last name. In fact, there is even the chance that I have mis-remembered his name, and it's not even Warren. It's kind of weird how I'm the one who ended up preserving these songs.