The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months.

If you’ve never heard of him, Joe is a completely original American storyteller whose shows have pioneered new forms of radio narrative over the last two decades. I’m most obsessed with his monologues, which are usually accompanied by eerie looped music, but his shows often incorporate other formats, including taped phone conversations, found sound, and improvised radio plays that Joe records with actors and then imposes a structure on in the editing room.

Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility. He’s spent his career grappling with all the grand topics: sex, love, morality, lust, greed, sin, fear, hatred, the search for meaning. Much of his best work is both utterly profound and completely hilarious. He often blurs the lines between real life and fiction, and his shows are sometimes explicitly about the creative process. At his core, he’s a tortured man who attempts to make sense of the world by telling stories about it. There is simply no one else like him. Can you tell that I’m completely obsessed?

And I have yet to even mention his voice, which is incredibly rich and expressive and spellbinding.

Much more about Joe after the jump, including details about his health, links to some of his work, and other info.

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A little shameless self-promotion: My Us Weekly-as-Harper’s cover from February is featured today in The New York Post’s weekly Hot List, coming in at number five. (The cover graphic appears in the paper’s print edition but not the online edition.) Also on this week’s Hot List, which is compiled and written by Maureen Callahan: The Daily Show: Indecision 2004, the first-ever DVD from that great show, and Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, the latest book by Freaks and Geeks co-creator Paul Feig.

Paperdoll Heaven is “an online celebrity dress up game for girls (and boys) of all ages. The original idea was to provide an entertaining game for girls which wouldn’t contain any of the contents that is usually associated with games directed to boys. There just weren’t too many games for girls. We want to offer a clean and good enviroment for girls to spend time with. … We get visitors from all around the world, most of them are of course girls of ages between 5-20.”

There are individual pages for dozens of celebrities, everyone from Eminem and Bjork to Ashton Kutcher, Kelly Osbourne, and the Olsen Twins. At the beginning of each “game,” the celebrity is wearing nothing more than skimpy underwear or negligee; you play by dragging clothes from the hangers and placing them on the appropriate part of the celebrity’s anatomy. That’s the concept, anyway.

Here is my favorite, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Hubba hubba!

According to Work magazine’s Work Blog, which is where I found it, the detourned New York subway map below was created by an artist named Marc Grubstein, who actually distributed it to unsuspecting New York tourists a few years back. I wish I had a high-res copy of this.

The creeps at Bad Touch Weekly have put Michael Jackson on the cover again. This must be BTW’s sixth or seventh Jacko cover in a row. Jeez.

This is hilarious: The fake Parents magazine cover I created for this website a couple of months ago has propagated itself all over the web, and now it’s earned its own page on Snopes.com, the excellent website that debunks or confirms urban legends. The cover’s distribution gained significant momentum last week when one of the friendly guys at Boing Boing posted it without realizing it was a joke (and without knowing where it came from). He quickly posted a clarification, but the ball was already rolling: The cover has been pulled out of context and posted in all sorts of places (32,615 hits on i-am-bored.com!), almost always by people who had no idea where it came from. Lots of people have thought the cover is real, so Snopes stepped in to debunk it.

In the post where I originally published the cover, I didn’t pretend it was real. I just meant for it to be an amusing (if juvenile) riff on a growing trend in magazine-cover design. So it’s bizarre to see the cover get taken out of context, and to watch credulous people actually wonder if it’s real.

A totally inadvertent hoax! Huzzah!

Check out this totally gratuitous and inexplicable pop-culture reference buried in a mostly sober article by Melanie Warner in today’s New York Times. The article is about one Rick Berman, an amoral jackass who propagandizes for food-industry interests through a well-funded front group.

About a third of the way into the piece, Warner refers to Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as “a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology.” I’m sure Jacobson is both tenacious and a Ph.D., but it seems likely that the two-word phrase is a punning reference to a certain Jack Black side project. It’s possible that the reference is to the traditional meaning of the phrase, but that’s not as amusing to contemplate. Regardless, the phrase is clearly a pun, and it’s totally gratuitous. What the hell is that pun doing in there? Is Melanie Warner a Jack Black fan? Was the pun inserted by a rogue D-ciple on the Times copy desk? When did the paper start allowing Entertainment Weekly-style wordplay into news copy?

This grainy amateur footage of half a dozen young drunkards is one of my favorite underground video clips ever. It’s bloody, it’s patriotic, it’s a disturbing window into the existentialist mindset of America’s intellectual underclass. The clip, which is probably about ten years old, captures a group of bored nonvaledictorians as they conduct experiments regarding the breakability of beer bottles when smashed against the human head. The footage is mesmerizing for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the sounds on the audio track: the triumphant yelps, the mournful howls, the shattering of glass, the dull thud of intact beer bottles caroming off of empty human heads.

As usual, this is from one of my Media Shower tapes. When Jamie Greenberg, Media Shower’s host, introduced this clip on his (now defunct) show four or five years ago, he described it as “kind of Blair Witch meets Animal House, with a touch of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter thrown in.” I can’t imagine a more apt description than that.

(If you’d like to link to this, please link to this post and not to the file itself. Thanks!)

These guys are numbskulls.

God, Tom Tomorrow’s strip this week couldn’t be more right-on. Some of it is below; go here for the rest. If you’re not a Salon subscriber, you’ll have to watch an ad first, but it’s worth it.