So, you mean like a letter opener, right?

In the mid-80s MTV had a show called The Cutting Edge, which starred Peter Zaremba traveling around the country and trying to find interesting things to broadcast, hopefully relating to music. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results were mixed; one of the show's highlights featured Daniel Johnston showing up unannounced at a sponsored barbecue and pushing his new tape, Hi, How Are You to a national audience.

Fig 1.1



More often the show became an theater of the contrived bizzarre, as best exemplified by the following interview with Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, who lived in a dilapitated shack full of the collected cultural debris of the past hundred years.

Fig 1.2


I stumbled across this a few days ago, and I still can't decide if its ultimately a good thing or not. It's one of those cases where you have someone who's clearly not mentally alright pretending to be not mentally alright, with the entertainment value deriving from the tension between the two and the fact that anyone could live that way, regardless of whether its an act or not. Uncomfortable. (Though I suppose the same applies to Johnston's appearance as well, which I feel weirdly okay with. Hmm.)