The “modern” and “enlightened” view of death is one of absolute materialist nihilism—there’s almost a competitive edge to it. “Just harvest my organs and burn me away!” exclaims one. “Throw me in a ditch and give me back to the earth!” one-ups the next. No one wants to appear sentimental, and the idea of anything other than a purely utilitarian approach to a corpse feels superstitious and anachronistic. I find the attitude a little self-serving—funerals are for the living, and mourners may be soothed by the ritual of a funeral or service of some sort.

In fact, I’m of the opinion that if you truly care for your surviving friends and family you’ll at least consider what New Orleans socialite Mickey Easterling did. Not only did the fabulously eccentric philanthropist request a grandiose, champagne-catered funeral, she left them with a diorama of her earthly remains! Easterling was displayed sporting lavish fashions, sitting in a garden setting mirroring her own back yard. The details are what gets me. Notice the cigarette at the end of of an elegant holder, the glass of champagne, and her broach—it spells “bitch. ” Fab. You. Less.

If the guests/mourners don’t appear put off by Easterling’s final request it might help to remember a few things. First of all, this is New Orleans, where the macabre has style. Second, Easterling was well-known for her joyous personality and free-spirited flair. She “wintered” in Morocco—using a season as a verb is the ultimate marker of a person enjoying their good fortune, in my opinion. And finally, this is not the first time New Orleans has bid farewell to a community staple with extreme embalming. Two years ago Lionel Batiste (vocalist, bass drummer and assistant leader of the Treme Brass Band), was displayed standing up, before his traditional New Orleans jazz procession/parade.

Maybe it’s a growing trend! We can only hope, right?
 

 
Via Paris Review

 
An Ottawa man by the name of “Popadick” (yeah, you heard me) was arrested Tuesday at Riverside Ottawa Park for indecent exposure.

According to reports, since April 14th police had been receiving reports of “a balding white male exposing himself at Mooney’s Bay Park, a Rideau River park just north of the Ottawa International Airport.”

On Tuesday at around 9 a.m., police were again alerted by reports of the man exposing his genitalia to strangers along a park pathway.

Officers in the area were dispatched to the park, where they arrested Donald Popadick, 62. Charged with Indecent Act and Mischief, he is due for a Wednesday court appearance.

News Releases - Ottawa Police Service> Ottawa Police charge Ottawa man with Indecent Act and Mischief http://t.co/WkwWWZvLkj

— Sgt. Iain Pidcock (@SgtIainPidcock) April 29, 2014

I’ll admit I’m kinda curious to see a mugshot of this “Popadick” guy. So far, Ottawa police haven’t posted one yet.

As a side note, this quote from the Canadian National Post had me in stitches:

The name Popadick remains quite rare in Canada. As per a countrywide telephone directory search, only three households carry the name “Popadick,” all of them within a few hours’ drive of Ottawa.

Why did they feel obliged to add that, I wonder?

RECORD OF THE YEAR
Martin O’Cuthbert, “B.E.M.S” (Esoteric Records)
Seriously, when I played this record, an object on the wall started to vibrate very quickly, and I have witnesses to prove it. Martin O’Cuthbert is either a very evil person (just listen to the record) or a total fool (just listen to the record). Probably be big in Japan, and at a guess I’d say the whole thing comes off a Yamaha organ cos no synthesizer could sound that bad, could it?
—John Lydon, New Musical Express, July 22, 1978

How very Lydon, that his gesture of public praise for his favorite single of 1978 could just as easily read as a pan. “B.E.M.S” stands for “Bug Eyed Monsters,” and its author was the obscure synth-pop experimenter Martin O’Cuthbert.
 

”B.E.M.S,” 1978
 

 
O’Cuthbert was a more rough-at-the-seams contemporary of Fad Gadget, Gary Numan, The Normal, et al, and like those artists, he explored the very common early synth-pop themes of alienation and emotional deadness, self-releasing unfindable singles and EPs under the pseudonym Martoc. He lists as his influences “Kraftwerk, Pixies, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, manic depression, extra terrestrial cultures.” No Earthly idea how the Pixies fit in, as Martoc’s music seems to have changed very little through the years, as is demonstrated by the new compilation Music for Alien Ears. The title and artwork refer back to Martoc’s 1983 collection For Alien Ears, but the new comp includes music from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘oughts.
 

 

”The Vigilante Rules,” 2009
 

”Navigator Through Nowhere,” 1979
 

”Born in a UFO,” 2005

There’s more music to be heard on Martoc’s Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages. Also, his personal web site is as endearingly primitive by current web design standards as his music is by current production standards.

Thanks to Bent Crayon John for cluing me in to this.

 
On April 2, 2006, The Sunday Times treated its readers to a review of an exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art documenting the gloried and storied past of a notable German band from the 1970s some of you might remember called Lustfaust. Their sound followed in the footsteps of The Sweet and T.Rex with some power tools and a little electronica mixed in—this band was German after all), Lustfaust consistently wowed audiences in their favorite venue in West Berlin (the Cold War was still a thing, remember), Der Blaue Auster Bar. Of course their music was mainly the provenance of connoisseurs, so they never got nearly as big as Can or Einstürzende Neubauten. But back in the day, they impressed some people. 

The author of the article, highly esteemed cultural critic Waldemar Januszczak, gushed that Lustfaust “cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers. There’s also an interview with the band’s surviving guitarist. ... [The exhibition] all makes for creepy and fascinating viewing.”
 

 
According to the bio on the band’s impressive Facebook presence,
 

Lustfaust were an experimental noise band active in West Berlin during the late seventies and early 1980s. Featuring a Japanese jazz drummer, Matsushita Bobby Kazuki, a Belgian guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, Guido van Baelen, a German bassist, Hans Berger, and the California-born, German/American Peter Kruger, the band was a curiously international mixture, initially formed through a mutual distaste for the inoffensive music that it was for the most part their job to produce. They freaked out and rocked out with cement mixers and guitars and an aggressive on-stage presence. They also pioneered the burgeoning cassette culture of the late seventies.

 

 
There was only one problem with all of this: There never was any experimental noise-rock outfit in Germany called Lustfaust. It was all made up, the invention of a British conceptual artist named Jamie Shovlin. Lustfaust supposedly played gigs in 1977, but Shovlin, their inventor, wouldn’t be born until 1978. Januszczak, the writer at The Sunday Times, had been duped. (Alas, the article that got Januszczak into trouble is behind a pay wall.)
 

Fake Lustfaust memorabilia
 
Januszczak’s colleagues didn’t come down too hard on him, I think because deep down, they all felt, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Both David Lister and Alice Jones in The Independent defended Januszczak. Jones called Shovlin’s mock tribute “a masterful, elaborate piece of fakery,” continuing:
 

A thorough researcher need only Google the name, and an entire page of web-links pops up, from Lustfaust’s Myspace profile, complete with mp3, to an entry on Wikipedia and even a very rare recording of Lustfaust’s album Uberblicken/Uberzeugen on eBay (sadly no longer for sale), not to mention www.lustfaust.com.

 
As Shovlin says, as befits a proper “conceptual artist” rather than some slimy con man, “I don’t think that the ultimate aim of the work is to trick someone into thinking that Lustfaust existed. ... It’s just slightly humorous when that happens.” He did sprinkle a reference or two to Spinal Tap in the curator’s notes, after all.
 

This split 7-inch actually exists.
 
It’s worth checking out that aforementioned Lustfaust Facebook presence—the elaborate ingenuity and TLC that went into it is fairly astonishing. There are lots of photos of the “band” in their heyday (1977-1979), and that includes studio pics as well as shots from gigs in Berlin and Rotterdam. There’s memorabilia and album covers up the wazoo, gig posters, buttons, you name it. Spend three minutes scrolling through all the pictures and you’ll begin to wish that they had existed, they looked like they were a force to reckon with.

Once the band, er, “existed,” the only thing to do was to ... put out some music! In 2007 Lustfaust put out a split 7-inch with Schneider TM, an actual German musical act. The two acts also played a gig together on September 13, 2007, at the improbably named Haunch of Venison venue in Berlin (no more Cold War by this time), which video is supplied below (it’s multi-part, but you know how this works).
 

 
The great Duke Ellington, a giant even among the most gigantic giants of 20th century music—I mean seriously, who deserves to be included in his rarified company? Lennon and McCartney? Stravinsky? Miles? Louis Armstrong?—was born on this day in 1899. The man was a force of nature, gaining recognition for jazz as an important American art form, financially keeping an orchestra together for decades (that wasn’t easy!) and composing, playing and conducting some of the greatest music ever made.

Every few years I go on a Duke Ellington kick. I tend to like the recordings from the mid-fifties onward mostly because they sound better. One absolute gem in Ellington’s later years catalog is Such Sweet Thunder, a longform twelve part suite that he and Billy Strayhorn wrote in 1957 based on the work of William Shakespeare. The name comes from a line of Puck’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” Ellington said of the work, that it was his “attempt to parallel the vignettes of some of the Shakespearean characters in miniature—sometimes to the point of caricature.” Such Sweet Thunder premiered at the “Music for Moderns” concert at New York’s Town Hall in April of 1957, but without the suite’s final number, which had not even been written yet.

Such Sweet Thunder was an early stereo recording, but due to problems with the production, was only issued in mono when it came out in 1957. It wasn’t until Sony started to look into their vaults during the 1999 Ellington Centennial that a stereo Such Sweet Thunder was issued.

Below, the CBS radio premiere of Such Sweet Thunder with introductions from Ellington, at the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, July 1, 1957:

 
“Such Sweet Thunder” and “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” live in Switzerland, 1959:

 
A wild avant garde ballet choreographed by Maurice Béjart to Ellington and Strayhorn’s score, directed in 1960 by Joachim-Ernst Berendt for Belgian and German TV:

 
With their Third album in 1970, Soft Machine practically discarded their previous sound and instead of just hinting at it (strongly) made a dive headlong into jazz rock fusion. At the same time Miles Davis was completely changing the course of popular music with his Bitches Brew, Soft Machine were exploring similar terrain, but coming at it from a different starting place, in their case, the psychedelic underground of the UFO Club (which also spawned Pink Floyd).

With Third they gave up any pretense of being a “rock” group with the intense opening song suite “Face Lift” lasting nearly nineteen minutes! The exciting, improvisatory nature of their live performances meant that no two concerts were ever alike.

That such out-bloody-rageous music would be taken seriously enough to be afforded two half hours of French network television in 1970—how many channels did they even have back then, I wonder—is, of course, a sign of that time, but also that Soft Machine were actually a pretty huge group in France. This wasn’t the first time the band was given an extended TV slot, nor would it be the last.

The way this is shot is distinctly continental, eschewing the typical British and US TV tropes of shooting a live band and trying to create an artificial tension. There’s enough tension in the music already and the venue itself, Theatre de la Musique in Paris, is spectacular. When Robert Wyatt is doing his vocal improvisations, the camera is ON him. Similarly, during his solo on “Eamonn Andrews,” we’re seeing Elton Dean’s face. This is the short-lived five-piece line-up of Soft Machine when Elton Dean, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Robert Wyatt were joined by Lyn Dobson on soprano sax, flute, vocal and harmonica.

In part one they do “Facelift"and “Esther’s Nosejob.” In part two, the set consists of “Eamonn Andrews,” “Backwards/Mousetrap” and “Out-Bloody-Rageous.” This originally aired on the POP2 series.  Click here for the entire concert (I can’t embed it).
 

 
Most online reviews fail to yield much practical information. Once in a while, you’ll see a pattern that appears to document legitimately poor service or quality, but usually I’m just perusing Yelp to laugh at pretentious douchebags complaining that some Thai restaurant isn’t “authentic” enough. (We get it Andrew, you’ve been to Thailand.)

It’s only once in a great while that you see online customer feedback that really tells a story, and this Amazon review for 1,000 live crickets is part Kafka, part Monty Python and part ultra low-budget insect-ploitation film. That is, its absurd hilarity is only tempered by the ominous prose and generally nightmarish quality of the situation. It’s so goddamn poetic, I’m thinking of turning it into a one-act play. Try reading it aloud. Under a spotlight. Like Shatner.

Warning! These crickets are not in any container other than the outside box!

I now have a cricket infestation of my entire house because, assuming as any normal person would that they would be contained in some kind of critter container.

I cut open the outside box and HUNDREDS of crickets jumped out, on me, into my bedroom & the entire house. They are in my underwear drawer, closet, and crawling on my toothbrush. My roommate is always screaming. They drown in our coffee, eat my bread, and are on every wall, and scare the crap out of me by jumping on me while watching scary movies.

And they excrete everywhere!

Why is there no warning or at least logical packaging?

I don’t know what to do, I don’t want to spray the entire house with insecticide (which the seller should pay for if I did), other than borrow a hundred lizards.

I just hope they don’t breed.

That last line! How fucking ominous is that?!? That’s “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”-style ominous!

What follows is almost heartbreakingly predictable—his cricket-buying brethren are unsympathetic to his woes. They denounce him as a fool, and even accuse him of cocking up the heretofore perfect five-star rating of their cricket merchant! The folks who buy live crickets are probably a tiny set, and the admonishments he receives from this small community must sting. Who among us has not accidentally let loose 1,000 live crickets in our living room?!? Among the heartless responses:

You suck. Because you were too stupid to know to open a box that you knew to contain live crickets in a “safe” container like a huge garbage bin, this seller now ships his crickets in not one but TWO airtight boxes. 1,000 bodies in airtight box = they were all dead as doornails. So thanks. Thanks a lot.

Such callow, reactionary bitterness! But take heart! Our hero has kept his humor and adds this to the thread:

How to Keep Crickets in a Box: A Tutorial

1. Know beforehand that the crickets in the box are not contained in any way.

2. Have a magic spell that compels crickets to “sit” and “stay” exactly where they are inside the box and not jump out. In the event that this magical spell does not work, proceed with the following.

3. Do not open the box with a box cutter both horizontally and vertically.

4. Do not open the sides of the box widely in enthusiasm of seeing the lovely fat crickets.

5. For numbers 4 and 5, do not do this while holding the box in your lap sitting cross-legged on the floor.

5. When the crickets suddenly burst from the opening directly toward your face, like the plague of locusts in Egypt, some landing on your face, hair, and one getting tangled in your eyelashes, do not scream like a little girl and jump up from your cross legged position on the floor, knocking the box sideways and allowing the majority of crickets to escape with glee.

6. Once you have untangled said cricket from your left eyelashes, and regained your senses, do set the box upright and close the lid containing the small amount of crickets that are left.

7. Do set a pillow on the top of the box and run to the garage to get a bigger box in which to house the smaller box.

8. Don’t accidentally choose one with small holes in the corners.

9. Come back to the small box and notice that crickets have easily escaped the pillow deterrent, so there are only a handful left.

10. Take the pillow off and shake the crickets into the tarantula cage.

11. Transfer the small box into the bigger box and tape the lid closed, making small air holes for the dozen or so left inside.

12. Don’t forget to check said large box for even the smallest escape route, for then the next morning you will find there are none left inside.

13. If all of the above fails, take comfort in the fact that you now have a naturally occurring cricket sonata to lull you to sleep each night.

Amazing. I’m not even scared of bugs, but I would have lost my jovial demeanor by this point. Scratch that—I would never have left the review in the first place. Had I dumped 1,000 live crickets in my apartment, I would have burned that fucker down and started a new life in some climate not conducive to crickets, and I would have left my endlessly screaming roommate to perish in the flames. That’s not something you really recover from and he needed to be put out of his misery.

Our hero’s suffering and persecution is not in vain however! A Mary Magdalene character by the handle of “Drummer Girl” leaves this in gratitude:

Hi, I’m sorry for the snotty comments you got but I’m glad you posted this. I just ordered crickets for the first time and if I hadn’t read this, I might have done the same thing. I would not expect a box full of loose crickets like that, either. Especially the first time ordering. I’d expect them to be in a mesh bag or another box or something. Thank you.

No, thank you, Madam, for your kindness and your mercy! I’m telling you—one-act play.

 
In 1967 CBS produced a half-hour program on the household of the 21st century that, from our vantage point, cannot fail to be fascinating. The passage of time inevitably makes fools of sages; it also confers on the people of the present tense a wholly unearned feeling of cocksure confidence, all because “we” know things that “they” cannot possibly know. So it’s important not to let that arrogance get the better of us.

Having said that, they didn’t do such a great job in predicting what we’d be doing in 2001, much less 2014. But they did nail a couple things almost exactly.
 

 
The show is obsessed with the activities of the nuclear family and so very worried about growing trends of urbanization. According to the program, by the year 2001, fully 90% of the world’s people will be living in urban environments. In the United States at least, the year 1967 was approximately the start of a massive wave of suburbanization—a nit-picker might claim that such people are living in urban systems, but either way modular systems of construction such as Israeli–Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, which debuted at the Montreal Expo in 1967, are not relevant to the average suburbanite. Meanwhile, Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis suggests the miniaturized micro-environments of Japanese culture as a model for the West. The average suburban tract housing gets somewhat trashed, but to my perception that is still the main model for non-urban American life, whereas in cities, the good old apartment building still reigns supreme.

It’s once we get into the regular suburban home that things get more interesting. All of us have just lived through a remarkable technological revolution that was really impossible to foresee in 1967—its main artifacts are the personal computer, the smartphone, and the Internet generally. Host Walter Cronkite’s future home is stubbornly analog, as it must be, but he and his team still get a few major things right. Most intriguingly, Cronkite takes us through a futuristic den, where the “man” will do much of his office work: “Now this is where a man might spend most of his time in the home of the 21st century. This equipment here will allow him to carry on normal business activities without ever going to an office away from home. ... In the 21st century it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.” (That’s what the man does; the woman has to be content with a very dreary-looking printout of a recipe. Her liberation would require revolutions that were less technological in nature.)
 

 
This is of course, uncannily correct—many people (including myself) have forsaken office life and accomplish most of their work tasks at home. Whether or not most of those people work for companies is another question (I don’t).

Their office has three bulky screens and a paucity of keyboards, as well as a massive telex-style device that functions a bit like a ticker tape, furnishing a display of news articles that can be printed out. What the producers of the show couldn’t see is that most of the devices would get smaller, and that most of the devices would collapse into a single device connected to the world at large. Still, even if it’s a little rough around the edges, they definitely crept up to probably the single most transformative changes of the last 50 years, our ability to accomplish tasks using devices with TV screens.

Another thing they totally nail is the advent of the microwave oven, whose ubiquity would more or less become a reality in the 1980s—largely as they describe it. However, their sense of the kitchen of the future is a little bit too pointlessly automated; for example, they seem to think that we’d be likely (with the press of a button) to have our plateware generated for each meal, after which it would be cleaned and the plastic remolded for the next repast. The idea of pushing a button and summoning brand-new dishes was a little too powerful for them, apparently. 
 

Cronkite and the living room console, with which he has called up a rousing football game on the TV.
 
Cronkite sensibly spends a little time with a British robotics expert, but while robots are an indisputably important feature of modern life, their presence in the average household starts and ends, more or less, with the Roomba. Those changes may yet happen, but at the same time our resistance to the household being taken over by an army of automatons may be stronger than they realized in 1967.

Their living room features a TV set that is roughly the size of a garage door—hey, science, when are we getting that, huh? The living room’s main feature is a console about the size of an average canoe where we can control the music volume, the lighting, and so forth. Again, it was difficult for them to see that we might not want so much real estate and complexity dedicated to such a simple array of tasks. In the case of that woman and her recipe, the real win for the person charged with cooking meals in 2014 isn’t the ability to print out a recipe, it’s the wealth of crowd-sourced information at our disposal. If I want a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich, within seconds I can access thousands of variations on the recipe, many of them validated in a crucible of upvotes and downvotes with helpful user comments

In the end, they did an OK job, while woefully underestimating the varying uses that different family members might have for the new technology. Beyond that, their preference for larger automated systems over smaller, modular systems seems off the mark. (Maybe they should have let the Habitat 67 guy modularize the in-house technology.) And beyond that, the pervasive role of the corporations who would sell us these great devices is also hardly mentioned. Maybe that was just assumed?
 

Vangelis and Dalí hanging out

Aphrodite’s Child was Greece’s most prominent contribution to the prog-rock scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They released End of the World in 1968 and It’s Five O’Clock in 1969, but their biggest accomplishment was still ahead of them: the double album 666, a rock opera about the Apocalypse of St. John as described in the Book of Revelations. The album was the brainchild of Vangelis Papathanassiou (music) and Costas Ferris (lyrics)—movie lovers will probably recognize the name Vangelis as the synth-y composer of the soundtracks to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, among others. 666 was extremely successful: although redolent of the excesses of the over-the-top prog scene of the day, the album sold 20 million albums, according to Wikipedia, and it is remembered fondly, garnering extremely positive notices from the likes of All-Music Guide and IGN in our own time. I must say, it holds up pretty well.
 

 
Once 666 was in the can, after toiling on it for the better part of 1970 and 1971, Vangelis and Ferris chanced to meet Salvador Dalí briefly in Paris. Afterwards Ferris decided to ask his PR man to get in touch with the great surrealist for the possibility of some kind of collaboration for the promotional materials. Dalí ended up visiting the band at the Europa Sonor studio, where he demanded to hear the entire album, all 80 minutes of it. Much to their surprise, Dalí was very enthusiastic about the album, calling it “a music of stone” (“une musique de pierre”) and saying that it reminded him of the great 16th-century woodcut master Albrecht Dürer (??).

Dalí proposed the following outline for a “happening,” to take place in Barcelona, then still under the rule of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, on the occasion of the release of 666:
 

1. Martial Law shall be ordered on a Sunday, in Barcelona. No one shall be allowed to walk in the streets, or watch the event. No cameras, no TV. Only a young couple of shepherds will have the privilege to witness the event. So, they can later describe it to the people, by oral speech.

2. Giant loudspeakers shall be put in the streets, playing all day the work 666, by Vangelis, Ferris and the Aphrodite’s Child. No live performance.

3. Soldiers dressed in Nazi uniforms, will walk in military march in the streets of Barcelona, arresting who-ever wants to break the law.

4. Hundreds of swans will be left to move in front of the Sagrada Famiglia, with pieces of dynamite in their bellies, which will explode in slow motion by special effects. (real living swans, that should be operated for putting the dynamite inside their belly).

5. Giant Navy planes, will fly all day in the sky of Barcelona, provoking big noise.

6. At 12:00 sharp, in the mid-day, those planes will start the bombardment of the great church, throwing all of their munitions.

7. Instead of bombs, they shall throw Elephants, Hippopotami, Whales and Archbishops carrying umbrellas.

 
Upon taking all of this in, Ferris dared to ask Dalí, “You mean, false archbishops, that is to say plastic or other dolls dressed as archbishops?” Dalí replied, “No, young man. When I say Archbishops, I mean real, living Archbishops. It’s about time to finish with the church!”

Alas, at some later point, Ferris ended up offending Dalí by bringing up Paul Éluard, to whom Dali’s wife Gala had been married before Dalí. Dalí was so upset that he mentioned having a duel (“Acceptez un duel, maintenant…”) and broke off contact with the band. (Personally I think the theatrics were a canny way out of having to follow through on an undeliverable promise ... slow-motion exploding swans?) 

Sadly, we can’t show you the happening—nobody can—but here’s the full album of 666 by Aphrodite’s Child:
 

 
via { feuilleton }

 
Thanks to its ubiquity in kids’ music appreciation programs, Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is easily one of the best-known pieces of orchestral music of the 20th Century. Even among those of us who don’t really know classical music in great depth, its main themes are instantly recognizable. As a broadly popular work that was in the USA’s public domain for many years (it’s not anymore, so if you’re an orchestra conductor, don’t go gettin’ any ideas) Peter has been copiously recorded, released, and adapted for other media, but the release that I suspect will be of the greatest interest to DM’s readers is the version I have, RCA’s 1978 LP—on green vinyl!—featuring an enchanting, beautifully recorded performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the great Hungarian-born conductor Eugene Ormandy, with narration by David Bowie.
 

 

 
Though the vinyl seems to have only ever been issued once, the recording remains widely available on CD—a quick perusal of Discogs reveals that it was issued on CD several times between 1992 and last year, with a frankly silly cover image of wolf ears collaged onto Mr. Bowie’s head.
 

 

 
We’ve heard lately that a few readers have had problems with Grooveshark embeds. If you’re among them and you want to hear this, there’s a YouTube playlist of the recording here. And if you don’t mind an abridged version (and you can endure an ad), you may enjoy this clever superimposition of the edited Bowie narration over a famous 1946 animated short.
 

 
Now, this has nothing to do with the Bowie version, but I don’t know when else I’m going to get to bring this up: if you still haven’t seen the 2006 stop-motion Peter and the Wolf by Suzie Templeton, you really need to do that as soon as possible. It’s free for streaming to Netflix and Amazon Prime subscribers (and a bargainous $2 for non-Prime users), and it is absolutely wonderful. I couldn’t find an embeddable version of the whole thing, but here’s a taste.