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December 1999

Recent additions to our ongoing serialization of our latest CD Good Times are as follows:

31.12.1999 / 10. Joy and power. In observance of the new millennium, which doesn’t start for another year, we bring you a new mp3 download from our celebrated recent CD Good Times, track 6, which gives away the farm with regard to its elegant energy.

26.12.1999 / 9. The simple way. This brief update will suffice to announce the web-availability of track 7 on the CD Good Times, now available for the hearing. This track sets up high hopes for our middle school students, only to be dashed before they are even savored.

18.12.1999 / 8. Reality of matter. This is track 8 on the CD. A part of the suite whose working title is ‘Fabulous things,’ this selection tracks the disillusionment of a group of middle school students as they discover the real nature of the world handed to them by their parents, both figurative and literal.

18.12.1999 / Snap Judgments. We’re still slogging through the stuff people send us, culling the wheat from the chaff, to use an agricultural metaphor, this being Iowa and all. Anyway, if I could actually go outside without tripping over a presidential candidate or get ‘mauled’ by the X-mas shopping rivers of crowd, I might actually have a social life instead of sitting at home with all the endless web site tweaking and what-not. But I’m not complaining, oh no! (continues). That said, here we go:

Le forbici di manitù (Manitou’s Scissors) by Lieutenant Murnau (1980-1984). This may well be a seminal anti-copyright work — which also has ties to the multiple personality activity of the Neoists, mail-art, and the slow boil that was the 80s zine and home taper underground. “The idea is,” says Vittore Baroni in a letter to Stewart Home, “that Lt. Murnau uses existing music without having to play instruments … .” I will be lazy and quote the press release: “Since 1980, news of concerts, performances, recorded works of this mysterious group seemed to originate and spread throughout Italy in a wild fashion. And when some cassettes, records or other works demonstrated to be really available on the market, the sounds that came out of them were strangely difficult to trace back to an origin: clearly lifted from pre-existent sources … , during these four years of existence-nonexistence, many bizarre and creative people who found their way into the functioning of this entity-nonentity. Then, in 1984, the doubts were solved. Lt. Murnau ceases to exist. The CD in question is a document of that existence-nonexistence. Contact: EON, via C. Battisti 339, 55049 Viareggio LU, Italy.

And a couple of web site links …

The Fragments web site has been expanded! Now featuring the controversial Official List of THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE MILLENNIUM! … Also — rants, essays, collages, dreams, doggerel and general silliness.

• Fragments, PMB #362, P.O. Box 5370, Santa Ana CA 92704

‘There is now a People Like Us website — at least in its very early stages. Instead of putting a big veil over it until it’s (never) finished we’re just going to be adding bits when we can. Apparently some browsers are not seeing the site in the way we intended, we will sort this out eventually. Please let me know if you’ve got any unusual ideas — about the website, that is …’.

• People Like Us — Vicki Bennett

Public Works Site Becomes a Two-way Street

13.12.1999 / Some people think we’re great; others say we suck. There’s some indifference out there, too — even profound indifference — but such people are ‘too cool’ to really, truly like anything. That means the ball’s in your court. Here’s your chance to let us (and the world) know what camp you fall into. Or you can hold forth on any topic, in fact — if it falls within our ideosphere, so much the better, but we’re not making up any rules.

We’ve set aside a large plot of cyberspace (don’t look too hard for it, you’re soaking in it) for you to let us know what you think about our site, our music, or our unbearable personalities. Called our Leave a Comment page, it is user-mutable, as it were, so the comment you add will end up at the top of the list. Hopefully your insightful blurbs won’t remain at the top for long, just until some other schmoe or schmosephine puts in their two cents. You get it? The last thing entered goes to the top of the list!

• Go ahead, comment on all that is us

12.12.1999 / 7. Our invisible supply. The seventh in our ongoing weekly mp3 serialization of our latest release Good Times is now available.

5.12.1999 / 6. Byways of Ghostland is the title of this week’s new mp3 download. If you think the previous track (14 on the CD Good Times) ended with a large question mark hanging in mid-air, then this track (no. 15) must logically be heard as the answer. The bone-crushing tedium of the service worker is rendered in purple prose (metaphor) made up of heaping helpings of surround-soundtracks from late-model Hollywood-style disaster flicks. Follow the Ascent of the Beverage Worker as he takes on man, machine, and himself. It is all part of the historic pageant that is human evolution.

New Review of Old Work. George Parsons of Dream Magazine was kind enough to send us along a tearsheet from his upcoming issue, with a short review each of our older titles The Grand Delusion and Matter.

• Read ’em

More Snap Judgments about Stuff Mailed to Us

4.12.1999 / Of the things we’ve received in the mail in the past few months, here’s what I’ve had the chance to go over for this week. Remember, if you want to send us something that you’ve published or produced, please use the P.O. Box address at the bottom of this page.

Audio Perverts and What Goes Around Comes Around CDs by The Motion Sickness Majorette Show. My snap judgment is that these are rough and free-form works of noise art that could’ve benefitted from more careful editing. Nonetheless, there are a few interesting moments, and no doubt this group will benefit from the experience of having produced these works, even if we don’t from hearing them. (Difficult handwriting, but what follows is my best surmise for the address.) Write: Fairways, Girfield Road, Bishops Waltham, Southampton, Hants., SO32 IAT UK.

Video Games of the 12th Century (A compilation CD). Given its slipshod, obviously hand-assembled packaging, I didn’t expect much when I slid it into the CD player. I soon found that this jam-packed 42-track 74-minute CD has quite a bit to offer. The attitude is generally scurrilous, but the range is broad: from spooky to hokey, from sober to genuinely funny, from actual songs to unrestrained outbursts. The tracks are so short that it just keeps moving along. What would you expect with an unfortunate name like: Burping Turds Musick, 4 Elm St. #204, Lancaster NH 03584.

1.12.1999 / Sfweekly.com on Detritus.net. You all might wish to read a recent article that has appeared in sfweekly.com about Steev Hise’s detritus.net project, which consists of a server and web site devoted to the ‘no-copyright’ pseudo-genre. In case you didn’t realize it, our own side project the Aggressive School of Cultural Workers is headquartered on the Detritus server; and, when you download our mp3s, that’s where they come from.

• Read about detritus.net in sfweekly.com