This Saturday, Sunday and Monday (June 5-7, 2004), the TV Land cable channel is running a marathon of all 64 episodes of the Addams Family tv series (one of my all-time favorites). If you're going to be taping, I see by their posted schedule that it is not a straight run through the sequence (they are repeating favored episodes in prime time). Presuming they stick with it (and I haven't made any errors -- double-check my work), here's the skinny on taping the complete episodes in order...

Saturday - 6:00am (eastern time) to 5:00pm [11 hours]
..........Episodes 1 to 22

Late Saturday to Sunday - 1:00am to 5:00pm [16 hours]
..........Episodes 23 to 54

Late Sunday to Monday - 1:00am to 6:00am [5 hours]
..........Episodes 55 to 64

32 hours total -- four T-160 tapes would handle it. I'd rather not bother... you know they're going to be festooned with superimposed logos and scenes will be cut to fit in a 21st century quantity of commercials, but it's the Addams Family -- and there are no DVDs. I would much rather have DVDs, but there's still no sign of them... not even on any upcoming release schedules (and I've been watching for a few years). I mean, what's the deal? Considering all the crap tv series that they've been stamping out on shiny discs, where the hell is the Addams Family?!?

Dropping the other shoe, here's another noisy nugget from the early eighties. We've already told you about our main band, Narthex. Now it's time to meet the Hunger Artists -- our accidental side project, purveying free-improvisation punk noise in micro-sized song packages for snappy freshness. Click on through to get the whole story and grab our early 1982 recording, Cruisin' In Zargon. You've heard noise, sure, but never quite like this. As always, c'mon back here for questions, comments or screams of pain.

When the tale of appliances is told in full, let none deny the glory due the humble toaster. So faithfully heating its coils and bringing our daily bread to a light and golden carmelized hue or perhaps a black and crunchy charcoal ash. Stalwart sentry of the countertop, asking for naught but a punch of your nose and an occasional dumping of crispy crumbs, I hail you as a bedrock of civilized life. Aye, I sing the song of toasters this day. Get thee hence to the Cyber Toaster Museum and the International Central Services Toaster Museum. Marvel at the majesty of our sturdy chromium champions of well-warmed baked goods and pastries. (yes, more old bookmarks, though I would be sadly bereft without my Toastmaster Model 1B14)

Playback (1958) is Raymond Chandler's final novel chronicling the cases of private eye, Philip Marlowe. It's not his strongest work, and certainly the shortest, but it has its moments here and there -- often in the spaces between plot-pushing scenes. More than ever, there's a feeling of Marlowe being burned out and ready to hang it up. His personal code of conduct really seems to be slipping. A good time to call it a day, shamus. Chandler still has a fine touch for atmospheric detail and setting, though.

Here's a fine old bookmark that I've been carrying around since the mid-90s... 8-Track Heaven. The prime site for information and emotion for the 8-track tape format. From the early days to the eternal afterlife and groovy players too. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-THUNK!

Elijah Wald's Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas is an in-depth exploration of narcocorrido and its composers. A sub-genre of norteño (popular throughout Central America and the US southwest (you may know it by localized names such as conjunto, Tejano or Tex-Mex), and incidently, far outselling the salsa and Cuban styles presented to Anglos as the be-all and end-all of Latin music), the corrido is a Spanish ballad form dating back to the middle ages, traditionally used to tell accounts of news events, heroes and outlaws. In recent decades, the lyrics have often told hard-boiled tales of drug traffickers (the compositions sometimes commissioned by the traffickers themselves), and gained the narcocorrido prefix. Wald hitchhikes his way around Mexico, interviewing the major composers of the songs and detailing the settings they are working within, from Sinaloa -- the state with the biggest badass reputation -- to Zapatista territory in the south. He also takes a sidetrip to Los Angeles to examine the booming scene there. Throughout, he personalizes the story with bits of color from his own wanderings, without going overboard in distracting from the main subject. Extensive discographical listings are included, and there is a companion CD floating around: Corridos y Narcocorridos.

More tire scrapes from the bookmarks... I know Mr.BaliHai gets all wobbly-kneed over kustom-krunchy cruiser bicycles, so here's a few links for him to phink out over. With wide-ranging content, there's Lowrider Bicycle Magazine. Then, hawking their varying wares are Phat Cycles, Bike Hotrod and the shameless Dyno Kustom Kruisers.

Continuing the dig through the bookmarks, check out Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp -- an excellent site tracing the life and art of one of the 20th century's major maverick artists (the site is Flash-based, though the technology is used brilliantly, for a change).

Here's another vintage link from the bookmark vault. Dust it off and check out Interesting Ideas -- featuring loads of outsider art, roadside art and assorted items of cultural obscurity.

It's funny how these linky weblogs seem to go in cycles. A month or so ago, while going through my out-of-control bookmarks file for its first real cleanup in a number of years, I found that, coincidentally enough, a number of sites from long ago were turning up on various weblogs of today. Something in the air, I suppose. So why shouldn't I also go straight to the source (that they weren't actually drawing from)?

Here's an old favorite of mine: A Child's Garden of Record Labels -- a fine collection of obscure 45s, presented alphabetically by label name, along with learned and puckish comments. A most excellent presentation.

So as it happens, this seller on eBay has lifted a whole load of text from my page documenting the history of Chrysler's Highway Hi-Fi in-car record players, without a whisper of credit, thanks or linkback. Checking the page code, you can even see my CSS markup, which of course doesn't do anything without the stylesheet. He/she would also be hot-linking to the images and snagging bandwidth besides, except they discovered in the page preview stage that I have hot-link blocking and grabbed their own copies of the images (how do I know this? the whole affair started turning up in my stats yesterday). Now I know I can't complain about some aspects... the images and most of the text comes from old brochures, press releases and tech manuals (never mind that I'm the one who went to the trouble of typing all of that text in, from original documents, long ago in 1997, when there was practically nothing online on the subject). But some of the 'borrowed' text is my own commentary. And see, what really bugs me, besides this being just the latest in a series of cut 'n' paste free rides that people have taken on my Highway Hi-Fi page, is that these people don't get the basic idea of the web. Namely: You don't DUPLICATE the information -- you LINK to it. Sure, information wants to be free, but channel its flow the smart way. And have a little courtesy about giving credit. Gee, aren't rants fun? Nah.

Diary of A Rock 'n' Roll Star by Ian Hunter (1974). Ian Hunter -- lead singer with the perpetually underrated 70s rock band, Mott The Hoople -- maintained this tour diary during Mott's November 20 to December 24 dash through the States in 1972 (between the albums All The Young Dudes and Mott). Originally published in 1974 as Diary of A Rock 'n' Roll Star -- though my copy is actually a 1976 edition by Flash Books, retitled Reflections Of A Rock Star and using cover art from Hunter's All-American Alien Boy solo album. Riding along with Mr. Clean's Dead Milkmen tour diaries, I decided to pull this off the shelf for a look at an even earlier era. It's a very interesting trip, from the days when record companies would routinely throw bands onto jets and send them zig-zagging around the country like pinballs. The tour routing is amazingly inefficient -- what madness. Hunter's chatty narrative is very friendly and characterful. There are passages that are hilariously non-PC by today's standards, though probably no big deal at the time. He deserves great credit for being tremendously open about... pretty much everything. He seems to hide few secrets from us (and seems to enjoy revealing his most doofus moments), making for a well filled-in picture of a period of rock culture that is far, far gone today. That said, don't expect wild tales of excess. Mott weren't into hard drugs or the groupie scene (the groupies apparently being more of a pestering than a pleasure, by this point in their career). This is more of a working-class rock experience (if you can imagine hanging out with Ziggy-era Bowie as the ol' work routine). A cool ride.

Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953) is the sixth Philip Marlowe novel, and easily the longest. Not that length has any bearing on its quality, but it does also happen to be an especially good entry in the series, with an elegiac feel and thoughtful pace. Somewhat in spite of himself, Marlowe makes a new friend, and when the friend gets into big trouble, things get messy fast. The remainder of the story finds Marlowe slowly making sense of the mess. As always, conveyed with gorgeously crafted prose. Here's a spoiler-ridden overview.