Monday, January 16, 2012

Like the mystics and statistics say it will....

Deep breath; exhale. Okay,  I'm ready for MY FIRST OFFICIAL BLOG POST.  I'm at least slightly embarrassed to be doing this (see Intro), but what the hell.  It's primarily a space to promote WOOL FM (wool.fm) and my show there, and I've been writing to a group of  about 20 to promote that for 3 months or so, so this is really just a different way to do that.  Besides, I don't have any work right now, so this might keep me out of the bars.

For the uninitiated, WOOL is a low-power community FM station located in Bellows Falls, VT.  It is staffed and run virtually entirely by volunteers who actually pay for the privilege of (occasionally) screwing up on air, in front of ones of listeners.  I've been doing the show for  about 3 1/2 years, after "chaperoning" my daughter Mariah's show ("Random Fandom", Wednesdays from 5-6 pm).  I've been a music addict ("Hi, I'm Mark....") my whole life, although, due to rampant lack of ambition and sticktoitiveness, I've never learned to play a note on any instrument.

My show generally has a theme, which is sometimes limiting, since often it leads to being much less eclectic than I'd like, and that my original show title (a play on Walt Whitman--"I Don't Sing: The Broadly Eclectic" [which last my daughter says is redundant; I think I disagree.  There'll be lots of digressions and asides and stuff like that if I keep writing these things]) promises.  Did you have to go back to reread that sentence to remember what the hell "promises" refers to?  I thought so.  But with a personal library of  50,000 songs or so ("Hi, I'm Mark...."), I need some sort of organizing principle.  I also try to be as topical as possible, which often leads me to rant about something socio-political with which I disagree with ( cf "Live and Let Die").

This week, though, anti-climactically, given that this is My Opening Farewell and in the face of the Repugnicant Party imploding and ignoring the one (arguably) astute thing Saint Ronald of Reagan ever said, his self-proclaimed 11th Commandment ("Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Any Fellow Republican"-- hardly the only Commandment that gang has broken), and also, stunningly, calling out Romney for taking the unregulated Free-Market Capitalism they all claim to revere to its logical well-played apogee (Is Newt a closet Marxist?),  I'm being resolutely uncontroversial ("Do I contradict myself?  Well, then, I contradict myself...."   There's that damn Whitman again) and, in honor of Mariah's visit to California, playing "California"-titled songs,  from Johns (both Phillips and Mayall), Joni, Lesley Gore and Led Zeppelin (there's a pair, huh?), The Gipsy Kings (now you know which version of that song), among others, and 2 suites, one by The Beach Boys, one by Jesse Colin Young.  My show is Tuesdays, from Noon til Two, on 100.1 FM and at wool.fm.  Hope you can make it!

Peace Out.

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