newcritics - Latest Comments in It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

ChromiumSwitch — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:05:36 -0000

This land is made of mountains,
This land is made of mud,
This land has lots of everything
For me and Elmer Fudd.
This land has lots of trousers,
This land has lots of mausers,
And pussy cats to eat them
when the sun goes down!

...find out more at chromiumswitch.org

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

paskunia — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:46:34 -0000

At family gatherings, whenever one of our younger cousins falls down, either me, my brother, and/or an older cousin will say, "Oh, he's no fun, he fell right over."
We don't explain the phrase (or Firesign Theatre) to our teen-aged cousins. Not that they wouldn't understand- they seem to be twice as smart as we were at that age, and we were not trolls- but the phrase is from another time and place, one that fostered originality, and all our cousins have today is derivatives.
Thus, I suppose, the phrase, taken totally out of context, would appear to be from some other eon, like the song "Alice's Restaurant". Hearing Arlo Guthrie's classic story every Thanksgiving gets weirder and weirder, because it is so stuck in the 60s- for good or for bad- that giving a listen to "Alice" now might be a flagrant violation of Doc Brown's rule against tampering with the space/time continuum- ie, bringing back something from forty years past and facing it today. And, more ominously, hearing the tune just one more time might render the entire universe asunder.

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

OutOfContext — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:08:10 -0000

J.-
I've only heard it on the Firesign Theater Album, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, hence my use of it in reply to this post. Mr. Tirebiter says it to Mrs. Tirebiter after he's spent the morning exfoliating their Victory Garden, if memory serves me.
-OOC

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

Jackie — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:41:18 -0000

Can anyone tell me where the saying - "Ten-four, Eleanor" originated. Is it from a TV show, possibly in the 6o's?

Much appreciated!
Thanks,
- J

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

bigbalagan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:58:58 -0000

Almost everyday I'm tempted to shout "don't use your hands, son, eat with your entrenching tool!" at my fourteen-year-old. (Imagine if he came back with "Don't worry Dad, no one can beat you for Dog Killer").

The missing piece isn't the dope, its the media. What FST did was take every standard media trope and cliche, build a bizarrely coherent stream of interweaving stories with them, and present the commonest of media experiences turned inside out. Not only was the team hyper=conscious about the norms and how to violate them, but even seemed to be conscious of their physical existence on vinyl ("going to the other side...").

So rather than needing pot, it *is* a kind of pot---a subversion of mass reality. The reaction has been so successful that this is now just another option, another aesthetic tactic, and no long can carry the same subversive charge. Your son is ok, he's just living in a different era...

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

Rory Mach — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:42:17 -0000

Exactly right, Dan. I've been listening to it for better than 30 years, and I'm still hearing new weirdness.

By the way, vinyl is still the best way to listen to this album. The interval created by needing to "turn the record over" was actually an important part of the timing. I lost my LP years ago, so I downloaded it from iTunes. Not quite the same thing...

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

Dan Leo — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:35:13 -0000

I'm so glad you wrote about the Firesign, Rory. I was tempted to, but it seemed like too much work to do it right. I love their stuff and I even still have this album on vinyl, goddamit.

The thing about the Firesign is they were very verbal, very literary, very dense in a good way. They made surrealistic movies in your head. You have to listen to the Firesign Theatre with both ears and both sides of your brain and do some of the work yourself. It's not comedy that happens to you, it's comedy that happens in you. There aren't really set-ups and punch lines. It's more like a symphony of punch lines.

And it also helps to be a little baked.

Groat clusters!

Re: It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling The Firesign Theatre

OutOfContext — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:18:22 -0000

Ten-four, Eleanor.

By the way, my teenage kids were truly disturbed when they watched the Exorcist for the first time with me this Halloween.