Notes, etc.
Recorded Entertainment #1There's this episode of the Jack Benny show, recorded during WWII and rationing, where they go to a butcher shop and take a tour of the freezer for 5 cents. Everyone sighs and oohs when they hear about the prime rib.
Jack Benny started in Vaudeville, then went to radio and television. Later he helped Jack Paar get his start; Paar ended up hosting the Tonight show and people still talk about how interesting he was, and how unpredictable. He was a magnetic loon. There's a chapter in one of his books where he rails against the fairies who were ruining the entertainment industry. It's bad. Jack Benny also boosted Johnny Carson's career. One stage Benny occupied is where Conan O'Brian's version of the Tonight Show was hosted.
Benny's fake-nemesis was a guy named Fred Allen. Allen's radio show doesn't hold up as well as Benny's—it's zaaany, whereas Benny has a sort of slow-burn goof that goes on for 20-plus years and evolved into about half of the likeable-but-exasperating-protagonist sitcoms that continue today(Seinfeld; 30 Rock; etc.) But Allen was a genius writer. His life in Vaudeville ( Much Ado About Me ) is one of my favorite books.
Sylvester “Pat” Weaver produced the Fred Allen show. He was the father of Sigourney Weaver. Who appeared on Saturday Night Live, which some say owes a debt to the Fred Allen program. (Years ago a friend told me that she was working at a pizza shop and a familiar-looking woman came in. “Do you play bridge with my mother?” asked my friend. “I'm Sigourney Weaver,” said the woman.)
Vaudeville was a kind of network. You had booking offices for hubs and the telegraph to manage the flow of entertainment, and the railroad to move the performers from city to city. It was an extraordinarily advanced and cost-effective for the time—a way to bring an enormous amount of entertainment to a very large country. Of course, the broadness that made it so appealing to lots of Americans began to look goofy when the sophistication of radio and movies showed up. Instead of bringing your act to the world you could bring the world to your act.
Recorded Entertainment #2So in 1993, BoingBoing tells us, a group called Mondo Vanilli made an art-prank album on Trent Reznor's Nothing label, but it was not released until now. The members of the group were “RU Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 magazine, composer Scrappi DuChamp, and performance artist Simone Third Arm.”
After listening to a few songs (the album itself sounds a great deal like Meat Beat Manifesto) I decided to find out more about Simone Third Arm and found this article from 1995. It opens with a skink voiding on Simone's chest. Then:
Fortunately, cleaning up piss and poop is nothing new for Simone. It is her business. For the past eight years, her performance art and videos have featured the timeless, classic elements of urine and feces--peeing into buckets, shooting cranberry enemas onto a canvas. Somebody's got to do it.
The only clue to her bizarre trade in the apartment, however, is a toilet seat mounted on the wall, with stirrups wired on either side. On a shelf, another toilet seat boasts circuit boards glued all over it.
“That's the commodem,” says Simone.
Emphasis added; also, oh no. And that is where the trail ends. I had two thoughts: (1) It's really good to have an “art name,” like “Third Arm,” especially if you ever plan to date online or deal with general population; and (2) How do you make a living when your poo art days are over? Like if you are going, perhaps gently, perhaps not, into your early thirties, followed by your middle-early thirties, then your middle thirties, early-later thirties, and finally later thirties? (People really slice up their thirties even though younger people don't care and older people just laugh.) Then I remembembered: You work as a project manager at a web development firm. I've met a lot of people who recognize in me a certain comfort level with weird personal histories and say things like, hah, yes, I used to work in blood porn, and I say, let's keep going with these wireframes.
Actually no I totally don't; I go, let's talk about that.