Come to Freddy’s Bar & Backroom on the third Wednesday of each month for our Humans Against Music karaoke spectacular. H.A.M. karaoke is your chance to dredge up your favorite A.M. memories and more — and win shockingly mediocre prizes. No teleprompter at this one — the lyrics are on paper, and your cue is Mr. Tokyo Rosenberg, giving you meaningful gazes and occasional sign language accompaniment.

“Destroying music one song at a time is not our goal — it’s only coincidental.” 

Occasional grand prize: Krakus Canned Ham — three pounds of porcine glory packed in a protective aspic layer!
Our song selection exceeds 1,000 voiceless tracks, and we add more each month. Ask for a copy of our song catalog. Requests for songs we don’t already have are welcome anytime. New songs will be added to our catalog in the month after the request is received.

American society is a time-bomb where the impending explosion is endlessly hinted at by horrifying “little” degradations of daily rape, murder, stupid violence of different varieties: urban gang violence, episodic mass killings, drug and alcohol-induced stupors and deaths, callous health care and classroom teaching, apparently crazy people talking on subway platforms, and so forth.

Attentiveness to daily lives is essential for those who would like to act purposefully to change the world. During the 1940’s and 1950’s The New Yorker ran a series of profiles by Joseph Mitchell of characters around New York. Mitchell wrote, “The people in a number of the stories are of the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of referring to as ‘the little people.’ I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.” The profiles are collected in Up in the Old Hotel. The reader will find there scarcely a single “political” reference, yet Mitchell and many of the people he wrote about would have adapted happily to an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Hard Crackers focuses on people like the ones Mitchell profiled. It seeks to document their strivings to overturn the mess we are in, to be a place where young people can express their dismay at the world they are to inherit, where the “battle of the sexes” can be openly explored, and where black people can express their bitterness at the prolonged mistreatment they have suffered at the hands of whites and the resentment on the part of many whites at being blamed for a history they do not think is their fault can also be heard.

Our title was taken from a song popular among Union soldiers during the Civil War. Hard Crackers identifies with that history, and especially with the experience “on the ground” of those who made it.

Can you believe it? We have followed our muse along the winding, weedy trail to this, the seventh annual installment of ShatShow. So how low can we go? Let’s find out!

First up, it’s WHITE COMANCHE, a notorious 1968 ‘paella western’ featuring the Shat-man just how we love him – in a crazed DUAL ROLE. Bill plays drifter Johnny Moon, not to be mistaken for his twin brother Notah – who has been making a name for himself leading peyote-fueled attacks on the white settlers of Rio Hondo. Sheriff Lomax (Joseph Cotten!) can’t keep the town at peace, and only a Shat-on-Shat face-off will settle the score. Shot in Spain on a Trek-break, and once called one of the ‘100 most enjoyably bad movies ever made.’

Then it’s something completely different: THE TENTH LEVEL is a serious-minded 1976 telefilm dramatizing a real-life academic study that aimed to determine how people (such as Nazis) will ‘just follow orders’ and inflict evil on others. Shatner plays the scientist leading the study, which administers electric shocks to students to steer them into performing tasks. Bill must reckon with his own motives – does he enjoy it a little too much? With Ossie Davis as his colleague, and John Travolta in an uncredited student role!

So come on out to the seventh edition of our annual phenomenon- we’ll drink, laugh and maybe learn a thing or three about human-kind. Of course it’s also Happy Hour at Freddy’s, with fabulous trivia and prizes. Warp 7, OC faithful!

Le Voyeur has become one of the most critically acclaimed bands on the rich and varied Spanish rock scene.

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David Loss with the Stars: Brooklyn based band formed by songwriter David Loss. Their sound is characterized by dreamy arrangements with lo fi notes.

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Le Voyeur meets David Loss to the closing scene of the “Episodio Aparentemente Letal Show”.