This week's 'widescreen radio' borrows a thought from Rick Riordan:  "The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles."  This might be stating the obvious, unless you're not from around here and haven't ever encountered an underlord rumbling beneath your feet, rising from somewhere deep within the bowels of the city as dusk fades.  Like vampires, they sleep throughout the day, and they roam the shadows of the city at night.  Unlike vampires, they aren't interested in your soul or your blood (if you're living in L.A. you've already given your soul away to something else anyway), they only want to watch you while you remain unaware of them doing so.  Who are they exactly?  Don't know.  No one does, that I'm aware of.  What do they look like or sound like?  Something lurking there in the corner of your eye, a fleeting shadow, or a muted voice heard from nearby but not understandable.  Someone told me they're the lingering after-energy of all those folks who came to Los Angeles years ago to find fame and, instead, died here unknown & broke.  Someone else said they're actually the glue that holds the massive mess of this city together, their arms stretched across the fault lines below us in order to keep the earth from breaking loose.  Regardless, there's only one thing we know for sure here at Workshop Lo-Vi:  'The Underlords Come At Night' (free to stream and/or download).

01.  INTRO ('WELCOME THE UNDERLORDS')
02.  STAR DREAM GIRL / David Lynch
03.  TALK ME DOWN / Willy Mason
04.  TUDO CABE NUM BEIJO / Seu Jorge & Nacao Zumbi
05.  LAY DOWN IN THE TALL GRASS / Timbre Timbre
06.  SIXTEEN / The Heavy
07.  PUSHIN' AGAINST A STONE / Valerie June
08.  GOTTA CHEER UP / Cotton Jones
09.  DIRTY HORSE / Gram Rabbit
10.  THE ANGEL & THE FOOL / Broken Bells
11.  IT ALWAYS COMES BACK AROUND / Michael Kiwanuka
12.  EVERYTHING UNWINDS / Willis Earl Beal

Workshop Lo-Vi presents 'The Underlords Come At Night'

Our musical tribute/nod to a favorite grainy-black & white-1970s-apparently simple road movie―in which a man travels from London to Bristol by car to clarify the mysterious death of his brother. But his private journey also stands for an excursion back into the sour '70s, and his failure to communicate with those he meets on the road―an army deserter, a garage mechanic, a woman in search of her child―becomes a rambling commentary on the obsessive, ironic disenchantment of living in Britain at the end of the 20th century. A rare, almost eerie attempt at mythic British cinema, which ends with its hero stalled in his battered old Rover at a quarry edge, his questions still unanswered, forced to move on into the '80s:  Workshop Lo-Vi presents RADIO ON: 1976-80 (free to stream and/or download).

01. (GET A) GRIP ON YOURSELF / The Stranglers / 1977
02.  SPIN IT ON / Paul McCartney & Wings / 1979
03.  GOT THE TIME / Joe Jackson / 1979
04.  THE HARD WAY / The Kinks / 1976
05.  TEENAGE KICKS / Undertones / 1978
06.  ROADRUNNER / The Modern Lovers / 1976
07.  BLANK GENERATION / Richard Hell & The Voidoids / 1977
08.  WHERE WERE YOU / The Mekons / 1978
09.  THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD / Wreckless Eric / 1979
10.  GABRIELLE / The Nips / 1980
11.  BABY BABY / The Vibrators / 1977
12.  YOU CAN'T PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY / Johnny Thunders / 1978

Workshop Lo-Vi presents 'Radio On: 1976-80'

Hey, have a Christmas, a very, very Chang-Cullin Christmas (free to stream and/or download)! And don't forget to keep your Kringles clean...

01. California Christmas / Gram Rabbit
02, Christmas Time / The Chris Stamey Group
03. Little Kliner / The Pork Torta
04. Deck The Halls / Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra
05. Bizarre Christmas Incident / Ben Folds
06. Don't Believe In Christmas / Junior Varsity
07. Merry Christmas Time / Southern Culture On The Skids
08. Christmas In Waikiki / Morgan
09. Stop The Cavalry / Marianne Dissard
10. Christmas Time / The Chipmunks
11. Winter Wonderland / Imagene Peise
12. Silent Night - Lord, Can You Hear Me? / The Flaming Lips
13. Little Drummer Boy / The Dandy Warhols
14. Joy 2 The World / 8 Bit Weapon
15. Elvis Christmas Turkey / Santastic III
16. Ole Year Christmas / The Sisterhood
17. Nutmeg / John Legend
18. I'll Be Home For Christmas / Naim Amor
19. It's Christmas Time / Yo La Tengo
20. Dim The Lights On The Christmas Tree For Mother / Al Foul
21. Christmas Don't Be Late / The Solace Brothers
22. A Cold, Cold Christmas / Stephen Colbert
23. Meditations On Greensleeves / B4skin featuring Electroshockbox
24. Auld Lang Syne / Marah


A Very Chang-Cullin Christmas #5

The Sourdough Singers were formed in 1964.  They were all high school kids and started perfroming at Lion's Club meetings, county fairs, amateur shows, etc.  My second cousin Gary CampbelI played the guitar and wrote "Lonely Nightingale" one night after his secret boyfriend went back to Texas Tech (Lubbock) after spending the weekend in Matador, Texas with Gary. The Sourdoughs started playing the song live and, as luck would have it, a disc jockey in Lubbock heard them and that got the ball rolling to make a single.  After it was recorded it briefly became a "pick hit" as far away as Canada.  Soon thereafter, the Swan label in Philadelphia picked it up for release on their label.

The song was recorded at Norman Petty Studio in Clovis NM, in the summer of '65, and the band's lead soprano had a bad cold which kept her from recording.  Luckily enough, my mother Charlotte Cullin came to the rescue and sang the part, though she wasn't an official member of the group.  Norman Petty Studios was also where Buddy Holly recorded many of his hits.

The original members were:  cousin Gary, my uncle Richard Campbell, Patsy Hankins, Janie Killingsworth, Judy Gwinn, and Nancy Traweek. 

Lonely Nightingale [Sourdough Singers]

America Public Media's WEEKEND AMERICA (December 2, 2006), 'Imagining Mourning':  Novelist Mitch Cullin has written about aging and loss in his fiction but recently he helped his mother write about her real-life struggle with those issues. He asked her to keep a journal of her battle with ovarian cancer. He tells Barbara Bogaev that sharing the journal with her helped prepare him for her death.

'Imagining Mourning'

Workshop Lo-Vi is the main creative outlet for joint mixed-media projects from and by artist Peter I. Chang & writer Mitch Cullin.  

Founded in 2004, Workshop Lo-Vi strives to create quality projects with little or no budget, utilizing as few accessories as possible, and cobbling the finished product together with tools/equipment that are easily available to anyone.  Previous Workshop Lo-Vi projects include the short film Regina Monologue (which can be discovered as an Easter Egg on disc 2 of the UK DVD of Terry Gilliam's Tideland), and the feature-length documentary I Want To Destroy America.  Tokyo Is Dreaming, a second feature-length film, received its world premiere in UK, at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2009 and its US premiere at the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.

So, please, won't you join us here, or elsewhere on the inner tubs of social medium, and say howdy if you do.

Lo-Vi Guys