365 Days of Outsiders

The 365 Days Project is a web-based archive of outsider music—365 MP3s available for download, with notes, cover art, communiqués from the artists, commentary, and other fun snippets. It's sort of like Found magazine for music—these are tracks found in thrift stores, recorded in Cedar Point recording booths and long-forgotten radio shows, rescued from attics. Some saw commercial release, some were intended for a few ears only, some live in that foggy, uneasy zone between commercial and private.

Tracks include Louis Farrakhan singing Is She Is or Is She Ain't?, The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Band Beer Drinking Song, Shatner's cover of Rocket Man, Orson Welles's semi-famous outtakes from a commercial for green peas, an early speech synthesis test from Bell Labs, a guide to recognizing Satanic messages in rock music...ohhhh, I'm turning into a puddle of goo here. Happy goo.

I'm in the process of downloading the lot right now, and many of them will reside on my iPod. So, if you're going on the SWIL vacation this summer, and if K. and I drive down, and if you're in our car...well, you're in for a treat, is all I can say.

Mwa ha ha.

(Blame philthecow for pointing me at them!)

=|:(# has ~

Remind me to begin using the internet acronym frot:) in my personal emails and IMs.

Travis Tea, of Justice

PublishAmerica claimed, on their website, that SF writers are "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters."

PublishAmerica is a vanity press that will accept pretty much anything.

Thirty SF writers set out to push the limits of "pretty much", by writing as ineptly as they could, "forgetting" one chapter, choosing two writers to write the same chapter twice, and letting a computer write one chapter composed entirely of Markov strings based on the previous chapters.

And their work was accepted. You can read a bit here.

(The strange thing is, I've read this before. But I can't remember where. Pain pain pain. Need pee—new pain.)