My favourite radio program at the moment is the brilliantly eclectic chances with wolves on East Village Radio. Besides a great name, there’s a mixture of rockabilly, soul, calypso, obscure covers, folk, hip hop and anything else they can get their hands on. You can listen to all the shows they’ve done online.
I also noticed this little number from way back when -
Willa Holland of the O.C., Gossip Girl and all sorts of other stuff I’ve never actually seen plays the ukulele! She’s even managed to get a song called Pretty Sweet Song, on the Spike Jones skateboard documentary, Pretty Sweet – so she’s okay in my books. You can listen to the song on spotify but it’s strangely absent from YouTube.
There’s also a nice interview with her in Marie Claire from a larger piece called Extracurricular Cool Women. Her obsession is the ukulele and she recommends using a shoestring as a strap.
Image: Marie Claire
It was -5, snowing, but I still caught that island spirit.
Gidget, a portmanteau of girl and midget, is a surfing movie with a girl protagonist from 1957. It’s no Nicholas Ray film but the first half, if you can get past the slightly annoying Gidget character, is watchable purely for the surfing and general bumming around. None of this wetsuit malarkey you get nowadays. It’s how surfing should be. There’s also a great party luau scene at the end of the film so it’s worth watching the whole thing, despite the ending.
Anyway, at the beginning of the clip the big kahuna is playing a ukulele, the instrument of kings.
