FOT Forum
The Best Show on WFMU => Show Discussion => Topic started by: Jouster on August 25, 2008, 07:50:04 PM
-
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/portraits_of_awesomeness_2
Highly complimentary, obviously.
-
Written by a man I am sometimes confused with, even. Also contains one of those rare instances, an AV Club article where I don't want to punch everyone who posts a comment to it. This in particular is superb:
Wurster calls are the heart of the Best Show. Tom's rants and stories are its brain. Normal callers are its hair. And GOMPs are its mighty fists.
-
(why did this show up twice?)
-
hey, that was my comment! Just braggin'
-
What about this comment, by "supercrotchinator":
Is it just me? Or does the picture make it look like the two fellas are lying in bed spooning?
I'd give that joker a good poke in the eye.
Anyways, an awesome article, and one that couldn't have come at a better time. I think Rabin may have earned himself a place in the cabinet when Best Show finally dominates the world.
-
As the bit stretches out pass the half-hour mark, it develops a hypnotic jazz-like rhythm, a weird musicality.
This seems like a slight nod to the high concept riffing that Dave Chapelle likens himself to...and Tom grimaced at.
It's apt in context of the article, but maybe a subtle insider reference?
-
Nice!
-
This article made me happy. Obviously no new information for me, but since I don't have any friends who listen (I've given 3 people Paul F Tompkins cd and only one has listened yet, The Best Show seems like a hopeless case for my friends), having a media source I already like write such praise is great. The AV Club is only steps above a blog, but its an important step and Nathan Rabin especially is a gifted writer.
Describing the show is so strange, reviews and profiles seem to always hook into the music geek/fandom angle. I totally understand why since its what is profiled best on the CDs. But what is most remarkable to me in the show and is something that I haven't seen in the few profiles of the show I've seen is how complete a satirical world Newbridge is. Music geekdom is something that only some people can relate to and can turn some off, but that Newbridge is a comedic world nearly as developed as Springfield is something a lot of people would like. I hope that in the future thats what people will see and write about The Best Show.
-
I'm always trying to get people into the show, Steve in NoHo being my only success so far. I may forward this article to one or two people who are on the fence. It's so weird how many people enjoy all types of comedy, inlcuding comedy CDs, but just can't wrap their head around why you think they'd like The Best Show. Still world domination hangs in the balance so I'll use any tools I have to.
-
Describing the show is so strange, reviews and profiles seem to always hook into the music geek/fandom angle. I totally understand why since its what is profiled best on the CDs. But what is most remarkable to me in the show and is something that I haven't seen in the few profiles of the show I've seen is how complete a satirical world Newbridge is. Music geekdom is something that only some people can relate to and can turn some off, but that Newbridge is a comedic world nearly as developed as Springfield is something a lot of people would like. I hope that in the future thats what people will see and write about The Best Show.
One thing that got me so hooked was how some of the real life callers seemed like seamless residents of Newbridge (Stevie Blue, Fred from Queens, Spike, even he who shall not be named etc.). Just another brick in the wall, but the show is more than the sum of its awesome parts. What comes after awesome?
-
One thing that got me so hooked was how some of the real life callers seemed like seamless residents of Newbridge (Stevie Blue, Fred from Queens, Spike, even he who shall not be named etc.). Just another brick in the wall, but the show is more than the sum of its awesome parts. What comes after awesome?
Julie had a pretty Wursteresque moment last week when she was saying everybody thought like her.
Julie: Whatever connection I make, seriously, I really believe everyone else makes it. 'Cause they're just like me!
Tom: So you're just like...uhhh... You're like uhhhhh--
Julie: everybody.
Tom: You're like Josephine Lunchpail.
Julie: Who's that?!
-
Describing the show is so strange, reviews and profiles seem to always hook into the music geek/fandom angle. I totally understand why since its what is profiled best on the CDs. But what is most remarkable to me in the show and is something that I haven't seen in the few profiles of the show I've seen is how complete a satirical world Newbridge is. Music geekdom is something that only some people can relate to and can turn some off, but that Newbridge is a comedic world nearly as developed as Springfield is something a lot of people would like. I hope that in the future thats what people will see and write about The Best Show.
One thing that got me so hooked was how some of the real life callers seemed like seamless residents of Newbridge (Stevie Blue, Fred from Queens, Spike, even he who shall not be named etc.).
Totally agree with this.
-
This article made me happy. Obviously no new information for me, but since I don't have any friends who listen (I've given 3 people Paul F Tompkins cd and only one has listened yet, The Best Show seems like a hopeless case for my friends), having a media source I already like write such praise is great. The AV Club is only steps above a blog, but its an important step and Nathan Rabin especially is a gifted writer.
Describing the show is so strange, reviews and profiles seem to always hook into the music geek/fandom angle. I totally understand why since its what is profiled best on the CDs. But what is most remarkable to me in the show and is something that I haven't seen in the few profiles of the show I've seen is how complete a satirical world Newbridge is. Music geekdom is something that only some people can relate to and can turn some off, but that Newbridge is a comedic world nearly as developed as Springfield is something a lot of people would like. I hope that in the future thats what people will see and write about The Best Show.
Wow, you bought 4 copies of the Paul F Tompkins CD? Buy me one?
-
In some sort of sick twist of fate, The Onion and the Onion AV Club is not opening for me. They have not opened all night. I've talked to a few other Cablevision subscribers who cannot open the site either.
What is going on here? I've tried opening it with Safari and Firefox, but no luck.
This is bizarre.
Tom.
-
Wow, you bought 4 copies of the Paul F Tompkins CD? Buy me one?
3. I passed one copy on and bought 2 as gifts.
-
In some sort of sick twist of fate, The Onion and the Onion AV Club is not opening for me. They have not opened all night. I've talked to a few other Cablevision subscribers who cannot open the site either.
What is going on here? I've tried opening it with Safari and Firefox, but no luck.
This is bizarre.
Tom.
And I thought I was the only one . . .
-
In some sort of sick twist of fate, The Onion and the Onion AV Club is not opening for me. They have not opened all night. I've talked to a few other Cablevision subscribers who cannot open the site either.
What is going on here? I've tried opening it with Safari and Firefox, but no luck.
This is bizarre.
Tom.
And I thought I was the only one . . .
Hope this helps: http://jottit.com/dbutk/
-
Fantastic press. Congrats.
I agree that Rock, Rot and Rule is the easiest key to the kingdom, if you are trying to get friends interested. Try anything else -- "there's this imaginary guy Philly Boy Roy who's hilarious" "there's a topic -- and people call in" "an imaginary place called Newbridge-- and it feels like you're trying to sell them knives that never need sharpening.
-
You're a prince, moonshake.
-
You're a prince, moonshake.
And possibly a copyright infringer. Thanks!
-
Also contains one of those rare instances, an AV Club article where I don't want to punch everyone who posts a comment to it.
I can't agree with you here. I'm with Tom that the Brooklyn Vegan commenters are some of the worst people in the world but the AVClub commenters are hilarious. Nothing seems to mean (for the most part) and the epic battle of obscure references is quite a thing to observe.
Anyways, I love to see my favorite website and favorite show getting along well. Woohoo!
-
Just in case it's still not opening, here's the full text
My old boss Stephen Thompson didn’t just recommend Scharpling & Wurster’s debut masterpiece Rock, Rot & Rule, which was recorded late in 1997 and released on CD in 1999, to everyone he knew; he damn near duct-taped his friends and co-workers to their chairs and forced them to listen to it. It was for our own good, of course. I will forever be grateful to him for turning me on to the God-like genius of Tom Scharpling & Jon Wurster, preeminent masters of long-form radio comedy, a dying genre they’re more or less single-handedly keeping alive.
I don’t know many people who sorta like S& W. They tend not to have casual fans so much as cultists, fanatics and die-hards, comedy evangelists who take it upon themselves to spread the gospel of S&W. I am one such zealot. This here piece is my appeal for you to join the flock. That is why I am making Scharpling & Wurster the subjects of the second installment in an erratically updated feature I like to call, “Portraits of Awesomeness”.
Rock, Rot And Rule was S& W’s first radio comedy bit together yet it contains all the hallmarks of the duo’s later work. As in subsequent pieces, Tom Scharpling plays himself, the host of The Best Show on WFMU, a beloved New Jersey freeform radio station. He’s a terrific straight man, the gruff voice of reason to Wurster’s giddy cavalcade of deluded maniacs.
In Rock, Rot And Rule, Wurster plays Ronald Clontle, amateur musicologist and the author of the fictitious titular tome, a rock and roll history billed as “The Ultimate Argument Settler”. Clontle boasts that his book definitively settles the eternal question of which acts rock, which rot and which rule. Clontle brags that his study is the first completely objective music guide but its methods are hilariously unscientific; the opinions are culled largely from Clontle’s day job working at Java The Hut, “Home of the Bottomless Wookie”. The criteria for which act fits into what category is as convoluted as it is arbitrary. Clontle’s “objective” judgments are willfully perverse. For example, he ranks Puff Daddy over The Beatles and David Bowie, who he cavalierly dismisses for having “too many changes”. There is a huge music geek element to Scharpling & Wurster’s work. Part of the bit’s fun lies in Clontle barreling into a bastion of elite music snobbery like WMFU with an unabashed dose of musical philistinism.
Scharpling opens the floor to callers, who are apoplectic over Clontle’s musical heresy, yet Clontle holds his ground. Wurster would go on to specialize in arrogant idiots who never let the fact that they are obviously, transparently wrong interfere with their unshakable belief in the rightness of their actions. It’s a high-wire act, especially once a tricky variable like outside callers are added to the mix. You keep waiting for Wurster to break, for the glib façade of dopey self-assurance to crack, yet it never does. Its fearlessness suggests Sacha Baron Cohen’s experiments in aggravation as Borat, Ali G and Bruno reconceived as radio comedy.
As the bit stretches out pass the half-hour mark, it develops a hypnotic jazz-like rhythm, a weird musicality. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Wurster doubles as Superchunk’s drummer and has played with R.E.M, Guided By Voices, The New Pornographers, Robert Pollard and many, many more.
There is a persistent thread of music-world satire coursing through S&W’s oeuvre, loving yet scathing digs at the absurdity of the rock business from an outsider adept at channeling insane outsiders. One of my favorite Scharpling & Wurster bits is a three-part saga concerning the fall of Mother 13, alt-rock poseurs with corporate sponsorships where their souls should be. The opus begins with a Wurster character named Corey Harris mistakenly calling Scharpling thinking he’s a Clear Channel morning zoo shock jock named Bobzilla.
Boasting that his band is a cross between Led Zeppelin, The Clash, The Who, Nirvana and R.E.M, Harris outlines his band’s attempts to conquer rock by playing Clear Channel-sponsored rock festivals with names like the Bud Light Snickers Dancing in the District Festival, the Heineken Chips Ahoy Fun Rally and the Earthlink Pringles Summer Slam Jam alongside made-up (yet disturbingly convincing) contemporaries like Sister Sheila and Splendid. Harris tries to win over the eternally skeptical Scharpling by playing him a bit of “Wired”, the first single off their new album High Dive. According to an interview with Wurster in these here pages, the duo originally used snippets from a real alt-rock pretender named Vertical Horizon but recorded an original song excerpt for the eventual CD. The new song is a brilliantly straight-faced parody of soulless alt-rock bleating, a song so processed and mechanical it sounds like it was created by poser robots manufactured in a sinister laboratory by Clear Channel scientists in an attempt to breed the world’s most generic college rock outfit.
In “Mother 13”, S&W nail all the details; the evocatively meaningless band names and song/album titles, the shameless whoring out to powerful radio conglomerates, the myopic worldview that leads bands like Mother 13 to suckle greedily at the teat of an industry designed to chew them up and spit them out. Behind the hilarity is a scathing satire of alt-rock machinery at its most grindingly mercenary.
Not surprisingly, the next time Corey Harris checks in with Scharpling the band has been dropped and has resorted to an even more ridiculous scheme to get attention without actually contributing anything of worth or substance to the world. This time out Mother 13 is determined to become the first band to play Mount Everest, a deliciously misguided plot that involves Travis Barker, Dane Cook’s brother, Buddy Guy, the Polyphonic Spree, and some seriously lax preparations.
Scharpling & Wurster bits often have a knowing rock and roll slant, but they’re open to lampooning cocksure idiocy and hypocrisy of any stripe, whether it’s a chain-swinging psychotic who brags about being the inspiration for The Fonz (“The Gorch”) yet recoils at how Garry Marshall and company downplayed his thuggish brutality or a proponent of the “hippified lifestyle” shilling for a line of countercultural products run by a company whose methods and ideology owe more to Stalin than Ben & Jerry (“Hippie Johnny”).
S&W routines often move slowly but surely from friendly camaraderie to confrontation. It isn’t unusual for Wurster’s gallery of oddballs to threaten to kick Scharpling’s ass by the end of a phone call. There are other motifs fans have come to love as well, like Wurster’s incredulous “Whaaaat?” when Scharpling expresses skepticism or outright disdain for his menagerie of outsized characters or Scharpling getting Wurster’s characters to sheepishly admit to doing something horrible and/or criminal.
Most comedy albums lose their pop after a single listen but there are so many levels to S&W that they hold up after a good dozen listens, though if you commute like I do, you might have to worry about the disapproving glares of strangers you’ll engender while laughing your ass off listening to classic routines like “Rock And Roll Car Dealership” (a revealing interview with the co-owner of Gene Simmons Toyota) or “Old Skull”. In “Old Skull” a cynical careerist reforms semi-infamous kiddie punk outfit as a jazz-fusion seven-piece. I used to live in a co-op (Le Chateau/Meridian/Pheonix stand up!) with an original member of Old Skull (the original group, not the fake jazz-fusionists) but you don’t have to be an ex-housemate of Jamie Toulon to find that shit utterly hilarious.
My fumbling words don’t do S&W justice, so I very much encourage you to check out audio samples on their website. So please, buy Rock, Rot And Rule, then all of their other albums. I’m asking you nicely, though I’m fully prepared to tie you to a chair and force their comic genius on you by force. But hopefully it won’t come to that.
-
Also contains one of those rare instances, an AV Club article where I don't want to punch everyone who posts a comment to it.
I can't agree with you here. I'm with Tom that the Brooklyn Vegan commenters are some of the worst people in the world but the AVClub commenters are hilarious. Nothing seems to mean (for the most part) and the epic battle of obscure references is quite a thing to observe.
Yeah. (http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/christian_lander/2)
-
So I'm reading the Fall Oscar bait previews on the AV Club today and notice this little reference dropped in the synopsis of Oliver Stone's W movie:
Premise: An ignorant hillbilly (James Brolin) with an incongruously aristocratic bloodline fucks around for 40 years with the aid of mountains of cocaine, gallons of booze, and enough loose women to stock a Texas whorehouse. Then he discovers Jesus, buys a baseball team, becomes governor of Texas, and kills a bunch of people through capital punishment. Then, in a far-fetched, credibility-straining plot twist, this funny-talking, semi-literate yahoo becomes a two-term President Of The United States and nearly destroys the world in the process. This sounds like the premise for a zany farce like President Baseball—albeit with a lot less baseball—but director Oliver Stone swears it's based on a true story. Like anybody should trust that crackpot.
First the internets, then the world!
-
Did anyone else see the nice write up about the Best Show in this week's A/V Club?
Spike gets a mention in it.
-
Did anyone else see the nice write up about the Best Show in this week's A/V Club?
Spike gets a mention in it.
Link?
-
It was in the physical paper but I didn't see it on the website so I went ahead and scanned it.
I think this should work.
http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/7724/swavclubbl1.jpg (http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/7724/swavclubbl1.jpg)
-
hold up...
Newbridge is fictional?
-
Thanks, Gregory!
-
hold up...
Newbridge is fictional?
It's The Onion, they can't afford factcheckers.
Very nice article!!
-
Thanks for taking the time to do this! What a great insight into the real life of The Best Show. My favorite part:
A woman from Cincinnati calls.
So ominous! Now if someone can save me the time spent doing some deductive searching on recidivism and tell me what show this was exactly, that would be great!
-
Yeah, thanks for posting this. I guess I didn't realize JW was usually in studio during the show. Or was this just a special case? I thought he lived in another state.
-
I always thought he was elsewhere, too, MoS. That startled me.
Nice article. Thanks, Gregory.
-
Thanks for taking the time to do this! What a great insight into the real life of The Best Show. My favorite part:
A woman from Cincinnati calls.
So ominous! Now if someone can save me the time spent doing some deductive searching on recidivism and tell me what show this was exactly, that would be great!
C'mon, son!
http://buffcoat.blogspot.com
Look through for Gene Simmons and PBR calling on the same night and you get:
September 9, 2008: Gene Simmons [100,000 Years] (~1:00), PBR [Turn Newbridge Into a Car Wash] (~2:03)
-
Yeah, thanks for posting this. I guess I didn't realize JW was usually in studio during the show. Or was this just a special case? I thought he lived in another state.
He used to live about 5 miles from me in NC, but someone in the chat said he'd moved to NYC this year. Which is odd because John Darnielle lives down here.
-
hold up...
Newbridge is fictional?
Lid-blowers, eh?
Great article!
-
Thanks for taking the time to do this! What a great insight into the real life of The Best Show. My favorite part:
A woman from Cincinnati calls.
So ominous! Now if someone can save me the time spent doing some deductive searching on recidivism and tell me what show this was exactly, that would be great!
C'mon, son!
http://buffcoat.blogspot.com
Look through for Gene Simmons and PBR calling on the same night and you get:
September 9, 2008: Gene Simmons [100,000 Years] (~1:00), PBR [Turn Newbridge Into a Car Wash] (~2:03)
Thank you very much! It was 100% laziness on my part, admittedly, yet you came through like a champ.
-
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/portraits_of_awesomeness_2
Highly complimentary, obviously.
So what page is this article everybody's talking about on I dont see it?
-
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/portraits_of_awesomeness_2
Highly complimentary, obviously.
So what page is this article everybody's talking about on I dont see it?
It was in the physical paper but I didn't see it on the website so I went ahead and scanned it.
I think this should work.
http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/7724/swavclubbl1.jpg (http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/7724/swavclubbl1.jpg)
-
Cool thanks. I was beginning to feel like more of an idiot than usual and I wasn't going to sift through all those web pages.