This week on The Sound of Young America, a special show dedicated to The Impostors, Coyle & Sharpe.
My guest, Mal Sharpe is one half of Coyle & Sharpe, a legendary pair of street put-on artists. In the early 60s, they roamed the streets of San Francisco with a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase, looking for marks. Their insane questions were met with amazing credulity by ordinary San Franciscans. Sharpe recently released a three-CD, one DVD box set of their work together.
If you or someone you know is in a sketch comedy group, SF Sketchfest has issued a call for entries. I've worked with the Sketchfest the past few years, and I think it's the best-run operation in the country. You'll get paid, have great audiences, and meet cool people. The festival is in January.
CALL FOR ENTRIES!
SF Sketchfest seeks sketch comedy groups, solo sketch/character performers, one-person shows, improv groups, short sketchy plays, alternative comedy acts, musical comedy acts and stand-up comedians for the Sixth Annual SF Sketchfest.
To download a printable application, please visit the offical festival website at www.sfsketchfest.com
Just wanted to thank Sound of Young America listener Chad from One Heart Press in San Francisco. When he heard I was moving to LA, he emailed and offered to print me some business cards. I had been putting off getting them printed -- they can be expensive. I couldn't believe it when Chad offered to do them for free, because he loves the show.
One Heart does really beautiful high-end printing -- wedding invitations, custom books and the like. What an honor! Thanks Chad! Take a look at their website, and check out the stunningly lovely pieces they make. I bet if you called and told him you heard about One Heart here, he'd give you a discount.
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A great audio clip: Scott Aukerman on the airwaves of ClearChannel's Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles as entertainment expert William Perth, offering his analysis of The Emmys. Great stuff. Scott was a writer on Mr. Show and is the co-creator of Comedy Death Ray in Los Angeles -- you may remember him from this Sound of Young America episode.
The New York Post reviewed Season Four of The Wire, which HBO has provided in it's entirety to reviewers (where's my copy, HBO? Let's do this thing.)
"The shows are so powerful - so well-written, acted, filmed and edited - that the experience of watching them has left me a complete wreck.
I am so blown away by this show that I will go out on a limb here to declare that these 13 episodes just might comprise the single finest piece of work ever produced for American TV."
Here it is... my first ever published anything. Like ever, including high school newspaper-type stuff. They asked for it, and two days later, I turned it in.
I was born in 1981. In 1982, I began composing my memoirs, with the able assistance of Presidential Historian, Pulitzer Prize Winner and Accused Plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin. Today, nearly a quarter-century later, I've created a 12,000-page tome that I think sums up the first 25 years of my amazing and inspiring life. I hope the book, when it appears, will help historians of the future understand my impact upon not only our nation but upon our world.
I'm currently in talks with a number of (largely imagined) publishers, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share a few excerpts from the larger text, which focus on my time in my adopted hometown of Santa Cruz. I expect these entertaining tales will cement my legacy as a Great Santa Cruzan, alongside other legendary locals like the guy from Survivor and the guy that decided to put a fiberglass caveman on the sky-tram at the Boardwalk.
Yesterday I spoke "on-air" with Joseph from The Small World Podcast. Small World is a show dedicated to interviews with people around the world, and from all walks of life.
The Daily Show is scrambling to replace the folks they've lost in a continuing talent drain. Besides the departures of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrel, Rob Corddry recently left the show to focus on his new FOX sitcom. (side note: if you watch the pilot, check out the funny titles Jordan wrote on Corddry's character's videos). Rob's brother, Nate, left the show for "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," and Ed Helms is headed for a regular role on NBC's The Office, and while he's not leaving, that's got to cut back on his Daily Show screentime. All of this leaves a bit of a vacuum, which TDS has been gamely working to fill.
Two Sound of Young America guests, Demetri Martin & John Hodgman have performed ably in limited roles, but some of the other correspondents the show has mixed in have been a mixed bag.
Last night, TV writer and actor Larry Wilmore was given a slot, and I think knocked it out of the park with a desk piece about low-quality racism. There's never really been a black voice on the show, and Wilmore's exceptionally well qualified, with a resume that stretches from In Living Color to The Office.
Haven't you always wondered where your home media market ranks? And how it compares to rival media markets?
I know you have.
Luckily, the good people at Neilsen Media Research have done some media research and answered the question. Here are the results. (Click the download link on the right for a full list.)
I think between middle school and graduating from high school, I must have listened to Digable Planets' album Blowout Comb 25,000 times. I interviewed Ladybug Mecca a couple years ago, and I told her that record changed my life, and it's true. Still stands with Sly & the Family Stone's "Fresh" as my favorite record of all time. Sounds better every year.
I didn't even know the album had two videos -- they terrified people when they went from "cool like dat" to "I stands in the face of oppression / with my sisters and brothers / no slippin' no half steppin'" and tanked big time.
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I'm getting sick of the way the MSM torques the story of Outkast to fit into their misguided ideas about what's good and bad in the group's music. (quick guide: rap stuff = bad, singing stuff = good)
I was excited to read this piece in the New York Times Magazine about Outkast, but I ended up so annoyed I wrote this letter (reprinted below, given that it's basically Dungeon Family Week and all):
When I saw that the Times Magazine featured a piece on Outkast this week, I was delighted. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the group a few years ago, and believe there are few groups in any genre who can match 'Kast. The piece itself, unfortunately, did not live up to my hopes.
In order to tell his apparently pre-ordained story, which amounted to "the further apart they grow, the better the group gets," Mr. Dee offered a complete misrepresentation of the group's early career. The group's first three records, and particularly ATLiens and Aquimini, their second and third releases (which Mr. Dee dismisses out of hand), are generally considered within the hip-hop community to be their best. On those records, they represented themselves as much more than just "two dope boys in a Cadillac," as Mr. Dee asserts. Indeed, they offered one of the most complex identities of any popular music group of the time. Their complex relationship and personae have always been part of their music. Outkast may have had their first gargantuan pop hits with Stankonia, but they were interesting and important well before the pop world picked up on them.
My impression from reading the piece, frankly, was that Mr. Dee doesn't actually like hip-hop. Otherwise, why would he be so strongly privileging other forms? I'm tired of the mainstream media feeding me the "hip-hop is so limited, but this guy mixes hip-hop with XXXX!" line. And goodness knows that if Mr. Dee was a hip-hop fan, he certainly wouldn't write anything as silly as this:
"In their brand of Southern hip-hop there had always been traces of the more outward-looking, less preening, light-on-samples rap of bands like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest."
You would be hard-pressed to find two more sample-heavy groups than Tribe and De La, while Outkast have used live instrumentation extensively from the start. Indeed, while Mr. Dee seems to find the presence of producer/vocalist Sleepy Brown on Big Boi's hit "The Way You Move" a "telling" sign of dissension within the group, it was Sleepy who both played and sang on the group's first hit, "Players' Ball." And of course, his comment implicitly devalues preening and samples, two of the basic building blocks of much hip-hop music.
Mr. Dee's piece is very well written, but it demonstrates clearly that he has no idea what he's writing about. Comments like the one quoted above betray the fact that he is only too happy to apply rock & roll values to the hip-hop world.
Within your very building, you have one of the most insightful urban music critics in this country, Kelefeh Sanneh. Maybe you should have run this silly piece by him before you put it in the newspaper of record.
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I'd hate to see any of you use this knowledge to VIOLATE COPYRIGHT LAWS, but here's a fascinating how-to on coverting MP3 streams to iTunes-able mp3 files, and even to podcasts (with a feed and everything).
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Live in Philly? Want to see a great comedy show? Well here's your chance. As part of my continuing effort to promote great comedy shows in places that don't always get them, here's the details of Paul F. Tompkins' Philly extravaganza: PAUL F. TOMPKINS, who is a comedian, is coming to Philadelphia to do comedy. Like stand-up type comedy, only funny. This will take place from WEDNESDAY AUGUST 23RD thru SATURDAY AUGUST 26TH, and will also include two other people doing stand-up comedy who call themselves Buddy Fitzpatrick and Ed McGonigal. All of this comedy will occur at a comedy club on SANSOM STREET that your people call HELIUM. Details: http://www.heliumcomedy.com/about.asp
Your instructions are to make plans to see Paul F. Tompkins do comedy, and to share those plans with other people and advise them that they should make a similar plan. There. Stop reading.... NOW. Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
Suggest a guest thread (mid-to-late August edition)
It's been a while since we've done this, and my tank's running low after a bunch of flat-out rejections, so let's start the SUGGEST A GUEST train movin' again. Suggest your ideas for guests below!
Remember the qualifications:
Anyone really really famous is a great suggestion, but only if you're friends with them and are willing to give me their email address and reccomend us :).
People with books that either just came out or are coming out are great. Same with CDs.
Anyone coming to Santa Cruz, Hattiesburg, or New Concord, Ohio in the future for something is great.
They should be of interest to people in general, not too insidery. (ie the "Probably no web comics or nerdcore rappers." rule)
Triple points for great women, this show has been a real sausagefest lately, and I hate that. And yes, I'm still trying for Amy Sedaris but no promises.
People with movies are tough but especially if it's an indie film, suggest anyway. Same deal with TV. I'll try but I usually fail, unless it's a real small channel.
The last couple of these gave me a lot of really great leads and ideas that I followed up on, and I really appreciate hearing from you all! Please know that I refer back to these all the time when I'm trying to book guests.
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KCRW in Los Angeles, to be specific. I'm a huge fan of their shows The Treatment and The Business, and I wanted to do my part. I couldn't give a lot of money, but as far as I'm concerned, they've earned something from me.
Which reminds me... are you a supporter of The Sound of Young America?
Maybe one day The Sound of Young America will be supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation or underwriting money from the Gap, but in the meantime, it's supported by people like you. Before every show, you hear the voices of the folks who give a couple dollars a month to help keep the program afloat.
The money you give pays my costs. It doesn't pay my receptionist, or pay for studio time, it just covers the things that come along and cost money. In the next couple months, for example, I'll need to pay for registration to the big podcasting conference, and I'll need a new monitor to replace the relic that occaisionally goes green on me that's sitting on my desk right now.
You can make a big difference for two bucks a month. Even if you're broke as a joke (and I know about that, believe me), your budget can probably handle it. If you're doing OK, you can give five or ten a month. My hope is that whatever you can offer, you'll offer something.
Sound of Young America super-fan Asterios and his sketch group, Overtime, wrote and performed this sing-long short, which Jordan sent over my way. Delightful!
Fun fact: the music publishing industry is not only suing (or rather, threatening to sue) free guitar tab websites, they're not really offering any legal online alternative.
A small handful of sheet music sites now sell guitar tablature. Mr. Keiser, of the Music Publishers’ Association, estimated that, including overhead costs, tablature could cost about $800 per song to produce, license and format for downloading.
Over on his XXL blog, TSOYA listener/pal/rap guru Noz offers a great rundown of The Dungeon Family, the Atlanta crew which spawned Outkast, Goodie Mobb and more. He's got bios, videos, songs, everything. I was just listening to the Witch Doctor album and thinking about how many dope projects even the B-team of the DF have put out over the years. For a bit of history on the crew, check out this piece from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He's even got a video (which I didn't even know existed) from Joi's superb unreleased LP "Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome," on which she channeled the great Betty Davis to funky effect.
TSOYA is cosponsoring this show because it's Patton plus my two favorite Bay Area standups plus two of the best up-and-comers. It's cheap. It's going to be awesome.
And it's completely un-advertised, so we're relying on you to spread the word. If you live in the Bay Area, or know anyone who does, please come or tell your friends. Post this flier on message boards: http://www.maximumfun.org/pattonflier.jpg or on your myspace, help any way you can think of. Hopefully we can get this thing sold out and everyone will see great comedy and hear about TSOYA.
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Lupe Fiasco is a real talent... though I have to admit that if this record hits, I'd be surprised. I love it, of course. Also love the E-40 eyeglasses Lupe's rocking :).
"I had to turn my back on what got you paid / I couldn't see - had the 'hood on like Abu Ghraib / but I'd like to thank the streets that drove me crazy / and all the televisions out there that raised me."
"Rust, a fungus disease, sapped the
wheat crop. Production of durum wheat dropped from the 10-year average
of 31,547,000 bushels a year to 4,976,000 bushels."
My guest, Mal Sharpe is one half of Coyle & Sharpe, a legendary pair of street put-on artists. In the early 60s, they roamed the streets of San Francisco with a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase, looking for marks. Their insane questions were met with amazing credulity by ordinary San Franciscans. Sharpe recently released a three-CD, one DVD box set of their work together.
My guest, Mal Sharpe is one half of Coyle & Sharpe, a legendary pair of street put-on artists. In the early 60s, they roamed the streets of San Francisco with a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase, looking for marks. Their insane questions were met with amazing credulity by ordinary San Franciscans. Sharpe recently released a three-CD, one DVD box set of their work together.
