Mixtape #6: Great Party Tape -- Informational Pictograms

cover art collage by GWR Waynes / StudioMONDO

I don't go to many parties, usually because I'm invited by one friend and the party is with friends of theirs. Large groups of strangers make me uncomfortable. I can be pretty gregarious and social if I have something in common with a few of the other guests but, once they start talking about things I have no knowledge of or interest in, my attention begins to wane, I start to feel out-of-place and I feel the urge to jet. It doesn't matter if it's a family event, either, as I don't really know many of my relatives and have always felt like an outsider around large groups of them.
    Also, I'm a terrible dancer. The only thing I do worse than dancing is playing any kind of sport that involves a ball. That said, my idea of party music is a little different. Being a nerdy record collector I tend to want to engage in conversations about what people listen to in their everyday lives. Most people I know don't listen to music outside of what's hot on the radio and don't go out of their way to discover anything new. Occasionally, a friend or relative will ask to hear what I think is fun music and I'll throw in a tape like this one. sometimes I get a polite "That's interesting..." or I get the full on gas face.
     Well, here's the track list for my tongue-in-cheek "party tape" and, be warned, there's nothing here to do the Cha Cha Slide to...

Recorded May 30-31, 1985:
A1 | Nona Hendryx & Material - Busting Out
A2 | Heaven 17 - (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing
A3 | The Clash - Mustapha Dance
A4 | Special AKA - Nelson Mandela
A5 | Was (Not Was) - Wheel Me Out 
A6 | Wall of Voodoo - Mexican Radio
A7 | Talking Heads - Girlfriend Is Better
A8 | Heaven 17 - Penthouse & Pavement
A9 | The Clash - Safe European Home

B1 | Alphaville - Big in Japan
B2 | Greg Phillinganes - Behind the Mask
B3 | David Bowie - Modern Love
B4 | Scritti Politti - Absolute
B5 | Ministry - All Day
B6 | Gang of Four - I Love a Man in Uniform 
B7 | Let's Active - Blue Line 
B8 | The Beat - I Confess
B9 | Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - Rattlesnakes

Mixtape #5: Take Back the Streets

collage on card c.1985 ©StudioMONDO

I've lived in the city all my life with the except one brief stay in a sprawling apartment complex in Atlanta that was like a buffer zone between the the city and the suburbs. It was close enough to downtown to have good bus service and close enough to the suburbs to be close to a mall and be near dead silent at night. I loved living in the city, though. Cities are for social people who like to go out and make new friends because gathering places are many and, often, the options are within walking distance of each other. The suburbs tend to be for those with families who already have a core group of friends and neighbors to socialize with. As I've gotten older I've started think about a third mode of living: the country. 

Now that i have a car (which, for those that know me, is a fairly recent development) the country's lure of quiet solitude beckons me and i think i could be comfortable with intermittent/molasses slow Internet (i have Verizon DSL now so how much worse could it be?), lame TV reception (i have a digital box that barely works anymore but i don't watch much TV anyhow). My Mom lives in the country and is very content to have satellite TV but she also has her sewing hobby and lots of family and friends to visit. I wish i had more time to go and visit her except i don't know how many more times i can spend the night sleeping on, what may be, the same bed i had when i was 11.

Still, for right now, i love living in the city.

The Take Back the Streets mixtape:

A1 Fear - I Love Livin' in the City
A2 Living Colour - Open Letter (To a Landlord)
A3 Nina Hagen - New York, New York
A4 Grace Jones - Barefoot in Beverly Hills
A5 Simple Minds - Theme for Great Cities
A6 Seventh Wave - Metropolis
A7 The Motors - Metropolis
A8 Eurythmics - The City Never Sleeps
A9 Randy Newman - Baltimore
A10 Elvis Costello - New Amsterdam

B1 The Platters - Harbor Lights
B2 David & David - All Alone in the Big City
B3 10,000 Maniacs - City of Angels
B4 Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Do You Know the Way to San Jose
B5 Rufus feat. Chaka Khan - Hollywood
B6 Flash & The Pan - California
B7 Siouxsie & The Banshees - Cities in Dust
B8 Talking Heads - Cities
B9 B-52s - Mesopotamia
B10 The Silencers - Letter From St. Paul
B11 The Lounge Lizards -Harlem Nocturne / Do the Wrong Thing

New to Me Music: Twink "Itsy Bits & Bubbles"

I don't remember how I discovered Twink (aka Mike Langlie, a very nice guy f.y.i.) but I'm glad I did. Twink's music is composed for and played on toy pianos and other odd things ranging from kitchen utensils to music boxes to 8-bit video game samples. He often collaborates with other musicians to make music that can be hyper-cute (in a good way, mind you) to oddly spooky.  I have a copy of his limited edition version of "A Toy Box" which is incredibly entertaining. As I get more disposable income I will definitely add more Twink to my record collection.
The latest collection of Twinkiness is called "Itsy Bits & Bubbles" and, after you listen to the widget below, how can you not want to have it to brighten up your day on a regular basis?

Mixtape #4: If I Had a Rocket Launcher...

 

collage on card © GWR Waynes / StudioMONDO

Si j'avais une lance-roquette...

Side One:

1. Ministry - Thieves
2. - Just Like You
3. - All Day
4. - Stigmata
5. 1000 Homo DJs - Apathy
6. Front 242 - Agony (Until Death)
7. - Angst
8. Ministry - Twitch (Version 2)
9. Cabaret Voltaire - No One Here
10. Front 242 - Geography II

Side Two:

1. Front 242 - Funkahdafi
2. The The - Gravitate to Me
3. Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
4. Big Pig - I Can't Break Away
5. The Fall - Copped It
6. The Weathermen - Poison
7. Age of Chance - Kiss
8. Neon Judgement  - Chinese Black
9. Chris & Cosey - Exotika
10. Borghesia - No Hope No Fear
11.  Front 242 - Geography II

Mixtape #3: Cafe Flesh

Move Over, Bambi by Guy Mondo, collage on card

I used to be a regular patron of the local repertory and art house movie theaters here until they started going under due to competition from the multiplexes, cable TV and home video. People no longer had to wait for a favorite vintage or foreign film to occasionally be scheduled for small screens anymore. Many of those theaters fell victim to developers when the owners could no longer afford to stay in their buildings. Long gone are my favorite movie houses like RKO Keiths, The Town, The Ontario, the Circle Theater chain, The Georgetown, The Key and The Biograph. 

      A few of these theaters tried to draw in audiences with special midnight showings of cult films. The KeyThe Rocky Horror Picture Show for several years while ran late shows of The Georgetown had moderate success with Bob Guccione's attempt at high-brow porn, Caligula. The Biograph also ran cult movies and annually hosted the Spike and Mike animation festivals which spawned the likes of Ren & Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead.

     One of the movies to make the midnight rounds at The Biograph was Cafe Flesh, an unlikely combination of dialog that references 1940's gangster-movie slang, deadpan acting, minimalist chiaroscuro sets and lighting, Red Scare atomic paranoia all wrapped in a surprisingly accessible Avant-garde package. The big surprise here, though, is that this is a porn film! It was written by CSI: Las Vegas scriptwriter Jerry Stahl who's life of addiction was was the subject of the film Permanent Midnight. Cafe Flesh's plot (yes, it does have one!) involves a future where 99% of the population has been rendered incapable of having sex without becoming violently ill. To assuage their stifled libidos, the remaining 1% are required by law to perform sex acts for their benefit. One of the venues for these shows is Cafe Flesh where a smarmy MC taunts the audience while introducing the performances that border on the surreal. The soundtrack was written and performed by Mitchell Froom (ex-husband of singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega).

     As much as I like Froom's original score I figured I could give the film a different ambience with music from my collection. The result was a tape I played in my Walkman on my bus ride to work on a regular basis. Tracks in BLUE are bits of dialog from the movie.

The Tracks:

Welcome to Cafe Flesh

Hungry So Angry - Medium Medium

All That I Wanted - Belfegore

Gushers

Sensoria - Cabaret Voltaire

The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight - Dominatrix

Pleasure is a widow maker...

Contort Yourself - James White and The Contortions

Need is the destination

Hot Doggy - Colourbox

Ask the Angels - Patti Smith

The skull in the cage

Faith Healer - The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Max outs Angel

No apologies

The Uh-Oh Squad - Robert Ellis Orrall

She's in Parties - Bauhaus

Angel's debut

Angel Face - Shock

Lie Back, Let Me Do Everything - Rough Trade

Max is back on top (my turn to laugh)

Duel - Propaganda

Revenge - Ministry

Moms, Max and the Poem

Let Me Cry - Yello

Uh-oh, trouble in Paradise   

Big Time - Peter Gabriel

Imagination - Belouis Some

The legendary Johnny Rico

Talk to Me - I Am Siam

Will's Mood - Doug E. Fresh

Intro - Skafish

 

Mixtape #2: Pop is a Weasel

"The Mirage" by Guy Mondo, collage on card

 A lot of the time I have a theme in mind when i record a mixtape. It's like having my own version of my favorite radio stations from my youth like WGTB-FM and WHFS-FM. Sometimes that theme gets sidetracked by my looking through my collection for songs, looking through my piles of clippings for the cover collage, cooking dinner, etc.

That's probably what happened with the first side of this tape. I think I had some kind of "good-bad-ugly" side of romance theme going before i lost track of what i was doing. Maybe I just lost interest in looking for more songs in my collection. Whatever happened I bounced around differing subjects until I was running out of space. I hate to have long stretches of silence at the end of a tape so, if there's not enough time left for a full-sized pop song, I like to fill that little space with odd, short song samples or bits of dialogue from movies and TV, hence, side one ends with "Sun Wukong (The Monkey King) - Scene 1" performed by The Chinese Academy of Peking Opera.
Side two finds me exploring a more left-of-the-dial indie-style playlist with the theme being danceable world pop. 

The Tracks:

A1 Main Source - Looking At the Front Door

A2 Ralph Tresvant - Sensitivity

A3 Howard Hewitt - If I Could Only Have That Day Back

A4 Talk Talk - Pictures of Bernadette

A5 D-Mob - That's the Way of the World

A6 Public Enemy - Burn Hollywood Burn

A7 Malcolm McLaren and the Bootzilla Orchestra - Deep in Vogue

A8 Janet Jackson - Escapade

A9 Black Box - Everybody

A10 Kane Gang - Don't Look Any Further
A11 The Chinese Academy of Peking Opera - Sun Wukong (The Monkey King)

B1 Black Uhuru - Brutal

B2 Bad Brains - I and I Survive

B3 Dr. John the Nighttripper - Walk on Gilded Splinters

B4 Ray Lema - Kamulang

B5 Desmond Dekker - Israelites

B6 Ofra Haza - Taw Shi

B7 Les Negresses Vertes - Danse des Negresses Vertes

B8 Mandingo Griot Society - I Haven't Seen My Lover

B9 Augustus Pablo - Pablo Meets Mr. Bassie

B10 The Specials - Message to Rudy

B11 Bad Brains - The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

Mixtape #1: Jesus Swept

"Jesus Swept" ©Guy Mondo, collage on card c.1987

About the title/cover:
Legend has it that, before he got famous, Jesus was a carpenter in his step-dad's shop. I guess, like any employee, he had to do a lot of different things around the shop so i'm pretty sure he had to sweep up all the time. I bet Joseph probably had to give his "Son-O-God" stepson a reality check every now and then, too, along the lines of "I don't care who your daddy is, you work or you don't eat! Now, get t'sweeping before I put my sandal up your ass!"

The Tracks:
A1 Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin - I'm in a Different World
A2 Soul II Soul - Keep on Moving
A3 The Call - Jealousy
A4 David Sylvian - Let the Happiness In
A5 Cherrelle - Everything I Miss At Home
A6 Black - You Don't Alway Do What's Best for You
A7 The Sugarcubes - Planet
A8 Stan Ridgeway - Mission in Life
A9 Shreikback - Faded Flowers
A10 Peter Gabriel - Of These, Hope (Reprise)
B1 Berlin - Sex (I'm a...)
B2 The Fixx - Saved by Zero
B3 Guadalcanal Diary - Where Angels Fear to Tread
B4 Skid Row - 18 & Life
B5 Concrete Blonde - It'll Chew You Up and Spit You Out
B6 Faith No More - Falling to Pieces
B7 Klark Kent - Don't Care
B8 Warren Zevon - Sentimental Hygene
B9 Public Image Ltd. - Like That
B10 Guesch Patti - Etienne
B11 The Police - Nothing Achieving
B12 Dick Orkin - Empire Carpet ad