Build Date: Tue Oct 22 17:50:14 2024 UTC
Oh right, like your opinions are any better then anybody else's.
-- Johnnie Royale
Art Bell Fires a Warning Shot Across the Pigdog Bow?
1999-07-09 03:04:56
Yesterday, while checking the Pigdog Journal feedback system, I was surprised to see a letter from influential talk show host Art Bell, asking if we would mind giving him a phone call. He wanted to talk about our recent article, which is about his attempts to manage the information coming out about his feud with the former guests of his program, David John Oates and Robert A. M. Stephens.
It was flattering to get an email message from Art because I'm a big fan of his show. The first couple of times that I tried calling, I got an answering machine with a humorous message telling me that I had reached a "thought recording machine," recorded in one of Art's electronically altered voices. Eventually, I sent him email asking him to let me know when it would be a good time to call to talk in person.
A message came in a few minutes before Art was to go on the air for that evening's "Coast to Coast" show asking me to "call now." Unfortunately, I had been out with my girlfriend shopping at Target, and I got back after the show was already underway. But I decided to wait until a commercial break and call anyway. Art's wife Ramona (I assume) answered the phone and patched me through to Art. As is my custom, I like to watch Art's streaming RealVideo "Studio Cam" every night during his show, so it was REALLY COOL to watch Art in his studio while he talked to me on the phone.
What follows is a ROUGH transcript of our conversation. I couldn't record the phone call, so this is in no way verbatim, but I sat down immediately after talking to Art, and tried to reconstruct the conversation as closely as possible.
ES: Hi Art!Art: You wrote an article saying that I am somehow having sites taken down. Talk to the people involved and see that's not true. The truth is up on the [Joe Oddo's "Shadie Pines" (sic)] site. If you go there, you will see what really happened.
ES: Yeah, I talked to Oddo in email and he said that you had mutually agreed that taking it down was the best thing to do.
Art: Yes, well, his service provider is actually giving him trouble about the site, heh. [I don't know whether he was referring to Shadie-Pines, the Shadie-Pines BBS, or one of the other linked web message boards.]
ES: Oh really?
Art: Yes. By the way, I've taken all of my stuff on my web site down too -- in the hopes of resolving the issue.
ES: Yeah I noticed that. But, Art, even if you are not asking to have web sites taken down, you are creating the appearance that you are doing that--
Art: I could not possibly do that... it's their decision to take a site down. The truth is all up there. I am not doing that.
ES: I am looking at the site right now. Isn't it true that with montana.com -- I know someone who previously worked there who said -- that you asked to have it taken down, but they refused. And he said that they had made the the decision to take the site down on their own.
Art: No, all I did was ask them to review the material. It was THEIR decision.
ES: Well, isn't it true that you had the Shadie Pines link removed from your web site because it had a link to a web BBS that had Robert Stephens on it.
Art: That was all Keith Rowland's decision. You know my web master--
ES: Yes. I don't think I should take the article down because that would make matters worse.
Art: OH NO, I just want you to tell THE TRUTH.
ES: Well, maybe I can ammend the the article with YOUR VERSION of the truth, but--
Art: NO, listen [heatedly], you go around to talk to the people involved and find out THE TRUTH and print that.
ES: But I don't think there's anything UNTRUTHFUL in the article.
Art: No, it's just MISLEADING. Listen, I have to go, I'm on the air.
ES: Okay, bye Art.
Wednesday's article, "Talk Show Wars Spin-Doctoring Backfires" prompted Art's request for a call.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)