Now Playing: The Clash--"Lost in the Supermarket"
Monday's radio in Ann Arbor (for me, anyway) ran hot and cold--as anywhere, it's a mess of different stations, some good, some bad, all of which inspire me with imaginings I'm sadly impelled to share with other people.
1. Technically not radio, but my colleague Adelito's 100% Funk CD. One of the more pleasant thoughts I had Monday was that Rick James' "Super Freak" should be made into an opera. I've been getting into opera recently (a drawback of local radio is the intermittent access to CBC Radio 2; Saturday afternoon's broadcast of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito fuzzed in and out with what sounded like a mixture of Jessica Webster's jazz show on the Ypsi NPR station and Ted Nugent--way to go, Nuge! that'll show those opera-lovin' pussies!), and maybe this is the inevitable result. You could cobble a libretto out of the title character's eccentric proclivities (think Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor) and various 80s movie cliches: rugged loner from the wrong side of the tracks loves spoiled rich cutie in leg warmers with secret lunacy issues (eating live squirrels?). It's all really an excuse to see Placido Domingo in full Lohengrin getup take the stage to belt out: "Sheeeee's a veeery kinky girl, the kind you doooooon't take home to maaaaamaaaaa..."
2. I plan to brush up on my knowledge of Proposal 5 well before the election in two weeks, but I'm leaning towards "yes" by the idiotic "no" commercial being run by God knows who. A man and a woman are sitting clinking crockery and silverware together in an unexplained fashion (are they eating? is it breakfast, lunch, or dinner? are the man and woman together, just friends, or in a server-customer relationship? who's who?) and I believe the man brings up Proposal 5 (something to do with financial set-asides and the Detroit teachers' union, apparently). It is hilariously awful. The woman begins to assail him with a variety of contentions that aren't really contentions at all but simple denials with no evidence supporting or refuting them. And why did they include the crockery noises? They add no versimilitude and the thing probably would have been more effective if it had just been the two people shouting. Now, I know that practically all political commercials are artistic pollutants, but this one scratches the chalkboard mainly due to the woman's prissy, hectoring, self-righteous manner. "New classrooms?" the man asks. "Nooooothing in there!" she replies in a voice that sounds like she's being done up the rear by a satyr. The man's pretty funny towards the end when he tries to be righteously indignant: "Why, that's not what they say at all!" Once I find out what "they" say, I'll know more. I'm guessing.
3. I stopped listening to WCBN largely due to the vast stretches of ambient agony that seemed to create their own radio orthodoxy, but also because half the time one can't understand what the DJs are saying. This is particularly true of one or two of the female DJs, who sound like they're ordering the domestic affairs of a dollhouse mansion. I heard one of them Monday night, though, and found her comprehensible and even charming. Maybe I'm the problem.
I certainly have nothing at all against the female voice, but these two happened to converge that day, which was bizarre. I'd grab that for the most exciting weekly event thus far. As for the commercial, it seems intensely trivial, but this is how our political process is organized these days. I wouldn't buy a fucking thing from those people.