At long last: The brilliant Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank finally has a podcast. A year ago today, I wrote a long post about Joe in which I talked about his amazing body of work and shared the news that he’d been sidelined by some major health problem whose details have not been disclosed. As I wrote last year, “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.” Read my June 2005 post for a lot more details. I think Joe Frank is simply one of the greatest American artists of the last two or three decades—in any medium.

According to reports on joefrank.com, Joe is still ill, but he’s recovering slowly and beginning to work on new shows. In the meantime, he finally has a podcast. As announced on his site last week, “Joe Frank podcasts have arrived! Twice a month, we’ll serve up either a one-hour show, or a couple of signature stories, or a half-hour show, and every now and then, some absurd extras.”

The first offering is an excellent hourlong show from 1997 called “The Other Side.” It’s a typically diverse Joe Frank episode: It opens with an actor (or is it an actor?) mangling a short passage from the Bible, then moves into an improvised phone dialogue between two actors. Later on are excerpts from a phone interview Joe conducted with an unidentified woman who is apparently a friend of his; she tells Joe about her doubts regarding her current relationship. (As he often does with his phone interviews, Joe cut out most of his side of the conversation, which gives the interviewee’s answers the flavor of a monologue.)

The rest of the episode consists of two classic Joe Frank monologues. The first is a paranoid, Raymond Chandler-ish tale of an office worker who is visited by a strange woman who forces him to accept a mysterious box. The second is a first-person story of a man who realizes, out of the blue, that he must leave his wife: He tells her calmly that he’s leaving her, then packs up his things, walks out the door, and checks into a hotel to begin a new life.

If you don’t want to listen to the entire show, you should at least listen to Joe’s two monologues—they begin at the 17:22 mark and the 46:52 mark. They’re fantastic. Otherwise, load the show onto your iPod, slip your earbuds into your ears, turn out the lights, and enjoy.

Here it is, the actual scene from Happy Days that inspired one of the more durable pop-culture metaphors of the last couple of decades. I remember watching this episode the night it was originally broadcast, in September 1977. I think I found the sequence tremendously exciting—“What if Fonzie DIES?”—but hey, I was only eight years old. My critical faculties were not yet fully developed.

I’m a few days late with this: Last week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly contained a list called “100 Sites to Bookmark Now,” and Panopticist made the cut. To compile the list, the E.W. editors chose 25 of their favorite sites and then asked each of their choices to supply three choices of their own. This site made it in thanks to literary blogger par excellence (and Panopticist friend) Maud Newton, who chose Panopticist as one of her three. Other fine sites on the list: Fametracker, Defamer, WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, and my pal Clive Thompson’s science and technology blog, Collision Detection. Here’s a scan:

E.W. has apparently stopped using Bureau Grotesque, except in its logo.

Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. I own one and am obsessed with it.

“Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

In 1967, two years before the first episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, John Cleese and Graham Chapman starred in a loopy sketch program called At Last the 1948 Show. Also in the cast: Marty Feldman! Master tapes of many of the episodes were destroyed a few years later, but several of them were eventually salvaged and released on DVD last year. And now some good fellow has put a couple of dozen short clips onto YouTube. The clips are pretty tame stuff, and not really all that funny, but they’re fascinating artifacts. In the clip below, Marty Feldman plays a neurotic train passenger who annoys the always annoyable John Cleese.

[via a friend on Echo.]

(You know how sometimes you get an idea for a magazine cover, and you sit down and create it, and it makes you laugh, but then you think, Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t post this, because it’s kind of in bad taste? And then you put it aside for a while? And then two or three months later you revisit it, and you find yourself thinking, Hmm, why not post this? And then you spend some time redesigning it, and then you upload it to your server? Like this?)

(The main coverline font is Tobias Frere-Jones’s lovely and ubiquitous Gotham, which you can buy from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

(Go to this page for more covers like this.)