no batteries, no tracks

The financial juggling required by homeownership has put the kibosh on such frivolities, but before adult responsibilities choked off my disposable income in the fall of 2004, eBay and I had quite the torrid love affair going on. I bought a number of cool items through the auction site; it was an invaluable resource for tracking down various popcult artifacts that I had either missed out on in the past or had once owned and lost to the sands of time.

Some of my more memorable purchases included:

- various punk and new wave records that I was never able to locate in the local used vinyl shops, such as UK Decay’s singles, the UXA album, Bonnie Hayes and the Wild Combo’s Good Clean Fun, plus band-related promotional posters and other materials.

- a Pakistani “katana,” which is little more than a 30” razor-sharp meat cleaver. I’m not one of those guys who gets all hot and bothered over weaponry, but I always wanted to own a real, honest-to-gosh sword, and the price was right. (Under $25, if I remember correctly.) My wife gets extremely uncomfortable around it, so it’s currently buried somewhere in the back of the bedroom closet.

- several G1 Transformers toys. Most, if not all of these, were repurchases of toys lost in the great upheaval of 1988 (following my mother’s death). Though the Transformers mythos always struck me as puerile (even when I was a kid), I have an immense love for Japanese robot toys.

- an original animation cel from Akai Koudan Zillion featuring Apple in an evening dress. It cost me all of eight bucks, including shipping. I know there are scammers passing off repro cels as originals and selling them on eBay currently, but I’m almost certain the cel I purchased is the real deal. It was a case of some anime retailer doing inventory and thinking “Who the hell is going to buy a cel from a generally hated series? Dump it on eBay and see who bites.”

I was never able, however, to get my hands on the one childhood artifact I really, really desired, a relatively complete, working SSP Smash-Up Derby car with a ripcord. Damn, those were fine toys. The noise the gyro-wheel made as the car screamed across the maroon linoleum floor of the dining room of the North Woburn apartment… My mother’s cats running for cover as it slammed into the baseboard and sent bits of snap-on plastic shrapnel flying… Oh, to be able to relive those moments with a new generation of household pets. That’s about as near as I get to a pre-midlife crisis.

The problem is that we’re talking about a thirty year old toy designed to crash into things and fall apart on impact, and vintage toy sellers happy to reap extortionate amounts of money from thirty-something nostalgia addicts with more cash than sense. As much as the desire to recapture a bit of that old childhood magic burns in my breast, I could never justify the cost outlay required to attain my holy grail, even when I had disposable income a’plenty.

Even after scaling back my ambitions to more attainable levels – a working non-Smash Up Derby SSP car (with ripcord) that didn’t look like it spent two decades buried in a sandbox – my dream still remains unfulfilled.

Basement Jaxx - Supersonic (from Kish Kash, 2003)

Spandau Ballet - Toys (from Journeys to Glory, 1981)

808 State - Crash (from 808:88:98, 1998)

we will build a better tomorrow

We are not Jesus Christ.

Jello Biafra and NoMeansNo – Jesus Was a Terrorist (from The Sky Is Falling, and I Want My Mommy, 1991) – Not as bizarre as you’d expect, given the parties involved (though the rest of the album has plenty of odd moments), this track could easily be mistaken for one of the faster, borderline hardcore tracks from the Dead Kennedy’s In God We Trust, Inc.

We are not fascist pigs.

Heaven 17 – (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang (from Penthouse and Pavement, 1981) – Heaven 17 sprung out of the British Electrical Foundation, which was a splinter faction of the Human League. Jo Callis of the Scottish punk-pop act The Rezillos joined the Human League in 1981. Human League frontman Phil Oakey has collaborated with Italio-disco/synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder. Moroder has also worked with Blondie, KMFDM, and Kenny Loggins. I’m not about to call “conspiracy” or anything, but if Loggins is involved, I suggest keeping one’s guard up. By the way, has anyone seen Jim Messina since the 2005 reunion tour?

We are not capitalist industrialists.

The (International) Noise Conspiracy – Capitalism Stole My Virginity (from A New Morning, Changing Weather, 2001) – Normally I’d be loath to blame the victim, but one really shouldn’t let all those honeyed words regarding amortization and profit maximization overcome one’s better judgment. Capitalism doesn’t care about you, it just wants to tap your fine, fine assets.


We are not communists.

The Eat – Communist Radio (from a 1979 single) – Killer powerpop/punkpop out of Miami, Florida. If you’re the sort of person who would enjoy this excellent track, that’s all you really need to know.

We are the one.

The Avengers – We Are the One (from a 1977 single, collected on The Avengers, 1983) – My late 80’s (bootleg?) reissue of this album was pressed on transparent blue vinyl. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to lick the record to see if it tastes like raspberries. (I never gave in to the urge so I can’t tell you whether it does or not.)

-----------------------------------------

If you haven’t figured it out already, this post was inspired by the lyrics to “We Are the One.” Well, sort of. I had the song lodged in my head the other day, and my subconscious created its own little mashup by segueing into “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” after the “fascist pigs” line. From such seeds do lazy-assed picture posts grow.

The Adventures of H and O: The Plan

(click to enlarge)

Like many ills that plague this world, this is Brandon Bragg's fault. While brainstorming the Civil War post, I remembered a scene from the late 1980's "Armor Wars" arc where Captain America was the voice of civic responsibility and a jheri-curled Iron Man was the lawbreaking renegade. When I showed the panels to Brandon, he suggested I should "mine the shit out that issue and turn it into a monthly Hall and Oates strip."

So here you go. Further installments to follow as the whim strikes me, until I run out of lame gags or get hit with a cease and desist order. Don't expect any musical accompaniment. I'm no stranger to self-loathing, but I draw the line at posting Hall and Oates tracks...

cancel my subscription to the resurrection

…send my credentials to the house of detention. I’ve got some friends inside.

I toyed briefly -- very briefly -- with the idea of matching appropriate panels from Civil War #7 to other lines from that song, but Doors references, like fresh ginger root, are best used sparingly. The song in question is “When the Music’s Over” from 1967’s Strange Days. It’s one of those long, rambling psychedelic death trips cited by the group’s rather fanatical fanbase as proof of the Lizard King’s divine genius, and for some reason it’s been stuck in my head since reading the final issue of Civil War last week.

I kind of wish it wasn’t, because I happen to really like the song, and it pains me to associate it with what turned out to be the most monumental damp squib in comic book history. All the hype, crossover issues, and delays, and the best ending they can come up with is “Captain America gets tackled by some first-responders, notices the property damage his crusade has caused, sheds some tears, surrenders, and winds up in prison?” My expectations for the event’s resolution were below ankle-height, yet it still managed to come up well short of that low bar.

Now that I think of it, the lines “stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/and tied her with fences and dragged her down” makes me think of the current state of the poor Marvel Universe. That brushes a little too close to fan entitlement for my comfort, though. The most appropriate song to have stuck in my head would be an acapella rendition of “Oops, I Did It Again” performed by Joe Quesada, Brian Bendis, and Mark Millar. (I will settle for the Doors’ track, I think.)

While I haven’t been thrilled with what DC has been doing with their event titles, I have to concede that they’ve been able to respectably balance the requisite shakeups of their superhero universe’s status quo with making sure that folks who want to read an unencumbered Batman or Superman story can satisfy their desires. The “one year later” gimmick, where the immediate post-Infinite Crisis situation was explored in 52 while the main titles followed their own courses, turned out to be pretty clever in retrospect.

Civil War, on the other hand, has set up a fundamentally untenable status quo (as far as superhero genre conventions go) that exists solely to segue almost immediately into the next big over-hyped event from the “House of Ideas.” (You know, there used to be a time when that term was used sans irony.) Maybe I’m wrong, though, and I’m underestimating the hunger Marvel’s fanbase has for stories dealing with government-controlled teams of superhumans building job training centers in Gary, Indiana or teaching literacy in the Appalachians.

I have to confess that the idea of each state having its very own official superhero team is pretty nifty. Just imagine the dramatic potential of a story where Green Mountain, Ski Bum, Old Yankee Cheese, and Graying Hippie fight the menace of maple syrup rustlers outside Montpelier. (I kid, of course. Anyone with the slightest awareness of how modern superhero comics storytelling works knows that these unnamed ciphers exist to be utilized as cannon fodder later down the big event assembly line.)

This post is far more rantish than the topic deserves, but I was aiming for something more substantive than the “eh” plus eyerolling that was my initial reaction to the comic. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been reading superhero nonsense long enough to have developed a fatalistic, mechanical view of how things shake out for the spandex and capes set. Every few years, it’s a new turn of the wheel, but it’s uncommon to see the wheel spun so obviously or to witness the people spinning it catching their fingers in the spokes.

The Posies – Surrender (from At Least, At Last, 2000) – An excellent fuzzed-around-the-edges cover of Cheap Trick’s anthem for the denim jacket, nickel bag, and custom van conversion generation.

The Cardigans – Iron Man (from First Band on the Moon, 1996) – I don’t usually take repost requests, but, hey, it fits today’s theme.

It's a shame Iron Man has become Marvel's go-to guy for dickish behavior, because I've known quite a few folks who weren't really into comics but loved the character. (It's something not limited to my circle either, apparently.) I suspect the appeal is rooted in the fusion of the self-made heroism of Batman with the powers and abilities of Superman, wrapped up in a shiny suit full of gadgets.

Finally, if you haven't seen it already, stop by Chris Sims's Invinicible Super-Blog and check out his "Civil War in 30 Seconds." You will be glad you did.

we are now experiencing technical difficulties

My webhost provider is currently doing maintenance on one of their server rooms, so the mp3 links on this site are currenly nonfunctional. Hopefully things will be up and running shortly. I'm going to use this as an excuse to kick back and relax for a day. In the meantime, here is some pure love in music video form:



Tune in tomorrow for my obligatory Civil War #7 post.

Update: Everything's up and running again. I'm still taking the day off.

you gained the world, you gained the world and lost your soul

I’ve stated previously that I really don’t laugh that much. It’s not that I don’t find anything amusing, but that my inner WASPiness tends to preclude uninhibited displays of emotion. As one of the ‘bots once quipped on MST3K: “Emotions are for ethnic people.” (An observation reinforced by many a holiday spent in the company of my wild Hibernian in-laws.) Haughty indignation is easy, laughter is hard.

Consequently, my standard response to humor is a throaty, muted chuckle that sounds like I’m channeling either Muttley from the Wacky Racers cartoon or Sebastian from Josie and the Pussycats. Another point of reference, for anyone familiar with the documentary If I Should Fall From Grace, would be the jovial hiss that passes as Shane MacGowan’s toothless (literally, in his case) substitute for laughter.

It’s a very rare occasion when I find something able to elicit outright, out loud belly laughs, but it happened the other night when I came across this response to Kevin Church’s comments about an old DC romance comic story he posted on his site.

Now, Kevin’s a big boy, and certainly doesn’t need the likes of me defending him, so that’s not what I’m doing here in this post. (You can read his response here.) It’s the fact that this “Poison Ivy” managed to take the rather reasonable argument that Kevin’s mockery (it was not a formal review) of the story failed to take historical context and the target audience into account, and turn it into an excessively earnest and overdramatic rant that had me laughing so hard I was on the verge of puking up beef stew all over my keyboard.

Part of the unintentional hilarity comes form the writer’s tone, which is logarithmically disproportionate for a response to a throwaway Valentine’s Day post from a comics blog. Reading the opening line…

I meant to post this a week ago, but I got so aggravated that I had to walk away for a while. Yes, even mild-mannered romance comic editors get testy.

…evokes a miffed Joe Besser threatening “I’m going to give you such a pinch!” to Moe Howard on one of the later Three Stooges shorts, and sets the tone for the entire affair. When arguing a point, I’ve personally found it wise not to put folks in mind of a comedian who played second banana to Joey Bishop, but to each their own, I suppose.

Apart from the over-the-top tone of the piece, there’s an intoxicating mix of genre justification, pop psychology, and use of gender dichotomy as a convenient form of dismissal:

Sorry, but when it comes to romance stories aimed at a female audience, I am not inclined to give men equal voting rights.

...because guys are too busy talking football and auto repair to understand the nuances of a shitty work for hire comic book story.

I've ready plenty of romance comics. While I don't have the same affection them that I have for their teen comedy (read: Archie rip-off) cousins, there was a good deal of innovation going on in the romance (and horror) titles of the late 60's and early 70's. Much of it was on the artistic end, where the format provided more room for artistic experimentation than in the superhero titles of the time. (Check out Jim Steranko's story in the Marvel Romance trade or this cover, which I'd love to get framed and put up on my living room wall.)

That said, no historical or psychosocial context can alter the fact that "I Don't Love You Anymore" fails miserably in terms of plot and as a work of sequential art. As for what Miss Teen 1972 thought of it, I'm going to hazard a guess she shrugged her shoulders and moved onto reading another, better story.

Then there's the bit that nearly made half-digested potato shoot out of my nose:

As for the web site guy’s low opinion of this story, I’m not so sure he even likes romance or has any understanding of it. His comments were in the form of a ha-ha quiz. He used a vulgar term for lovemaking that suggests he does not have the romance sensibility.

I suggest reading that last bit aloud in your best Delta Burke voice. (George Takei’s voice works just as well, too, I’m told.)

It’s very hard to explain why one finds something funny, because humor, even the most cerebral variety, ultimately works on a gut level. This confluence of melodrama, self-righteousness, and use of the phrase “a vulgar term for lovemaking” hit the exact right note at the exact right time for me.

Thank you, “Poison Ivy,” for making me laugh about genre obsessions, again. Please don’t hold this against me when I submit my novella to your very fine, very pink site. It’s titled “Emerald Skies of Desire,” and here is an excerpt that I hope proves I do have “the romance sensibility” despite the frailties of my gender:

“I was hurt once, badly,” Dash said softly as he peered out the window of his private jet. “I vowed never to love again, but…”

Emerald looked down at the day planner on her lap, trying not to make eye contact with the man who had plucked her out of her mundane Midwestern existence and opened her eyes to the beauty and wonder of the world past the Iowa horizon. In the process, he had captured her heart, as well.

At that moment, there was no Dash McSwarthy, jet setting venture capitalist, or Emerald Skye, personal assistant. There were only two lonely individuals, and the aisle between was a gap beyond measure, a gap filled with heartsickness and yearning.

I’m still trying to decide on a pen name. Any suggestions?

Our musical component of today’s post is a rebuttal to the idea that vulgarity and romance are not mutually exclusive:

Machine Gun Fellatio – Not Afraid of Romance (from Bring It On, 2000) – The best kind of love involves 70’s wakka-chikka funk samples.

Nor are they incompatible with the female gender, as these two tracks from femvox Bay Area punk bands ably demonstrate:

VKTMS – Midget (from a 1979 single, collected on VKTMS, 1997)

The Nuns – Do You Want Me on My Knees (from Cupid’s Revenge, 1995)

ready, steady, go cat go

Right-o, my feline friend, so let's just cut to the chase. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
Fighting the good fight for nearly seven decades, both on the mean streets and inside the boxing ring, Ted "Wildcat" Grant is an enduring reminder that, in these days of extreme superheroics and ungodly power levels, all a hero really needs is a killer right hook, a personal code of honor, and a couple longnecks of Milwaukee's finest to celebrate his (or her) inevitable victory.

A true champion, that man....

...not to mention very well-preserved for his age.

Carl Perkins - Put Your Cat Clothes On (from The Sun Years, Volume 1, 2000)

Me First & The Gimme Gimmes - The Boxer (from the Turn Japanese EP, 2001)

Raxola - Wildcat (from Raxola, 1978)

Jimmie Lee Maslon - Your Wildcat Ways (from Salacious Rockabilly Cat, 1997)

Happy birthday, Dorian!

and I ruin any kind of fun you have in mind

Complacency is a double-edged sword. While there is something to be said for blissfully coasting through life, free of the stresses that ulcerate the stomachs or hemorrhage the cerebrums of more proactive folks, there’s a very high risk that one’s slacker ways will spill over into areas of one’s life that need more than the minimal required service plan.

There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. No matter how comfortable with the status quo one may become, without an influx of energy, entropy will be the inevitable end result.

…and by “entropy,” I mean:

- your normally close-cropped hair has been allowed to turn into a pompadour with muttonchop sideburns

- there’s a package on the computer desk you’ve been meaning to mail to a friend in Seattle for weeks

- it’s been fourteen months and you still haven’t rescheduled the dentist appointment you cancelled, despite waking up with pains in your jaw every morning

- you can’t remember the last time you actually did anything outside the normal household routine with your spouse

- between the long playing sessions of Rogue Galaxy and searching the music archives for songs to match to individual Justice League Detroit members, you forgot you even have a spouse

No, I’m not talking from personal experience. What made you think that?

Dow Jones and The Industrials – What’s the Difference? (from Hoosier Hysteria, 1980) – Unlike better known punk stomper “Can’t Stand the Midwest” this is an excellent bit of art-damaged punk/postpunk and is more representative of the Indiana-based outfit’s unique sound.

X – When Our Love Passed out on the Couch (from Wild Gift, 1981) – Many songs with ambitious titles fail to deliver the musical goods, but this track isn’t one of them.

face worker, a serpentine miner

My twenty-five year love affair with Dig Dug began, as many love affairs do, in the dark alcove of a Howard Johnson’s off Interstate 90.

Every summer, my maternal grandparents would take my brother and I with them on vacation, although perhaps “vacation” isn’t the correct word to describe these trips. My grandfather was a very kind, generous man, but he was also something of an odd duck. His idea of a vacation was to gather up everyone into his gigantic sedan and drive to a set point, be it a motel parking lot in Asheville, North Carolina or a plot of swampland he owned in north central Maine, then immediately drive back home (except in the case of the Maine trips, where he’d stop in to visit family and putter amongst the blackflies and mudholes for a couple hours).

Whenever we had to make a rest stop or the occasional visit to a roadside tourist trap or strip mall, my grandfather would park in the furthest corner of the lot and send my grandmother, brother and me in to do our business while he sat in the car. This being the early 1980’s, there were arcade machines everywhere, and I could always count on scoring a couple of quarters from my grandmother in order to keep me busy while she tried to keep my grandfather’s deliberately complicated food order straight, lest he fly into paroxyms of rage over finding too much relish on his overpriced hamburger. (She never succeeded, nor did my grandfather ever want her to, I suspect.)

It was during one of these stops that I played my first game of Dig Dug, and it was a case of love at first sight. The graphics were amazingly colorful and detailed in comparison to the minimalist black backgrounds in vogue at the time, and the dig-your-own maze aspect (“free roaming gameplay” circa 1982) felt like a quantum leap over the preset environments of other entries in the maze game genre. The ability to actively manipulate the environment of the playfield, along with the directly-controllable ability to stun or kill persuing Pookas (tomatoes with ski goggles) or Frygars (fire-breathing green dragons) with your in-game avatar’s air-pump weapon, encouraged a level of creative gameplay that contrasted sharply to the rote pattern recognition skills required to master a game like Pac-Man.

I spent the years following that fateful encounter practicing my tunneling and monster squashing/bursting skills whenever the opportunity arose. If I wasn't biking to the nearest arcade (five miles away, by the train depot in Wilmington), I was sneaking away from my Cub Scout pack at Canobie Lake and making a bee line for the secondary arcade (next to the fake rocketship that would play clips from Journey to the Prehistoric Planet while the operator banged the hull with a stick to add drama) where the amusement park kept the older, less popular arcade machines in search of a Dig Dug fix.

While I've cast off many (but not all, not hardly) childish things over the years, my affection for Dig Dug has remained constant. It's simple yet elegant gameplay and visuals have not lost their capacity to entertain me, and it makes a great de-stresser and mental palate cleanser whenever the need for either arises.

Plus, there’s a certain visceral thrill to be had in luring a conga line of enemies to a squishy doom via falling boulder. Some things never go out of style.

Here’s a medley of the incidental music and sounds from Dig Dug.

Chaos UK – Pump It Up (from Heard It, Seen It, Done It, 1997) – Thank you, Chaos UK, for sparing me the indignity of having to post the Elvis Costello original version.

The Jam – Going Underground (from a 1980 single, collected on Snap! 1983) – I have the same reaction to The Jam that I do to Strawberry Pop Tarts. I love them occasionally in small doses, but there is a clearly defined limit to my tolerance, past which the love quickly transmogrifies into nausea.

Lush – Outdoor Miner (from the For Love EP, 1992) – I debated going with Wire’s original version of this song, but ultimately decided in favor of something a little more obscure. Besides, we all could benefit from a little more Lush in our lives.

gaining fame and claiming credibility

So, about the whole “nerdity” kick I’ve been on lately? It started off as an easy springboard for putting together ready-made themes, but I’ve come to enjoy the opportunity to pontificate upon and discuss the various related topics (fan entitlement, the nostalgia trap, and so forth) that come with the territory. Before settling on the mp3 blog gimmick, I had considered starting a comics-themed blog, but realized that there wasn’t a hell of a lot I had to say that wasn’t being stated more effectively elsewhere. The nerdity posts have allowed me to scratch that comics blogging itch without risk of infection.

It’s just as well I didn’t create a comics blog. How would I be able to live with myself if it turned out that Dick hated my blog? Or worse, put me on his “enemies list”? I’d probably cry myself to sleep -- not due to being hated (I’m used to that by now), but because I’d spent enough time blogging about comics to be hated for something I’d said.

If you happen to be reading this, Dick, I’d just like to state for the record that I’ve discussed Primal Scream with Graeme McMillan. I know Graeme McMillan. Graeme McMillan is a friend of mine. Kiddo, you're no Graeme McMillan. Hell, you aren’t even an Avi Green.

Elsewhere in the comics blogosphere:

Dorian’s “How Not To Blog: A Primer Born Out of Many Years Experience Blogging” is, by his own tag’s admission, “a thin veneer of satire hiding the rage underneath,” and as such, it’s right up my alley.

Ragnell has courteously provided a handy field guide to “The Twelve Levels of Comic Book Fan Agreement.” Forewarned is forearmed.

In the absolute “must read” category is Kevin Church’s “We Need To Talk: A Open Letter to Comics Fans.” It’s a highly articulate, well-composed howl of rage regarding dysfunctional fandom and how it affects the medium as a whole, and it’s something that really needed to be said. Change won’t happen unless we make it happen, people, and that applies to more than just comic books.

Here are a few tracks to watch the inevitably shrill fallout by:

Essential Logic – Wake Up (from the Wake Up EP, 1979, collected on Fanfare in the Garden, 2003) – To all those misguided souls who use the term “postpunk” to describe this year’s variant of whiny alt rock, this is what real postpunk sounds like.

Teenage Head – Ain’t Got No Sense (from Teenage Head, 1979) – The band’s mix of power pop, punk and rockabilly was very popular in their native Canada (that nation’s first “punk rock riot” occurred at one of their early shows), but never caught on in the States. Foolish Americans.

Christmas – Stupid Kids (from Ultraprophets Of Thee Psykick Revolution, 1999) – Underrated indie pop/rock out of Boston. The members of Christmas later went on to form neo-lounge act Combustible Edison. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that fact.

Pet Shop Boys – How Do You Expect to Be Taken Seriously? (from Behaviour, 1990) – The answer does not involve impassioned defenses of Marvel’s Civil War or creating a blog specifically to piss and moan about other comics blogs.

I want to go to Washington, D.C.

It’s Presidents Day, and while I suppose I ought to crack wise about the current individual occupying the Oval Office, there’s nothing I can say to match the increasingly surreal and bizarre pronouncements that have been coming from G.W. Bush’s mouth since the November elections. In any other sphere, the sort of delusional behavior exhibited by Bush and VP Cheney in their recent public appearances would be grounds for a psychological evaluation.

The lone hero who sticks to his guns despite overwhelming opposition is a powerful mythic archetype in American culture, and though Bush may see himself acting in that role, there has to be a point where the sheer weight of evidence to the contrary comes into play. A conductor who rides a train over a precipice because he puts more stock in his faith than in any fancy-pants reports about the bridge being out is not being heroic.

Bush has nominally acknowledged that some mistakes were made with his Iraq policy, but they have amounted to little more than a PR gesture nothing in the way of sincere contrition or introspection. In a manner typical of compulsive gamblers on a losing streak, he’d rather stake it all (read: other people’s lives and America’s wealth and credibility) on a double or nothing spin of the wheel than cut his losses and walk away.

I’d make a comment about how these are the same folks who’ve repeatedly suggested government should be run more like a business, but their brand of capitalism has nothing to do with Adam Smith and everything to do with subsidies, bailouts, and non-competitive sweetheart deals. It’s Soviet-style cronyism wearing a market-friendly face.

Pay no attention to the reams of empirical evidence to the contrary, comrades. That’s just defeatist propaganda being spread by those who hate all that is good and decent about our perfect society. Trust in the proclamations of your glorious leaders, and they…I mean, all of you will benefit by our inevitable triumph.

Slow Children – President Am I (from Slow Children, 1981) – Nice quirky new wave out of Los Angeles. It’s a pity that so many worthy American wave acts got lost in the shuffle between the novelty phase of the late 70’s and the genre’s fashion conscious, Brit-predominant MTV-driven surge.

Eighth Route Army – Vice Presidente (from a 1982 single) – Despite being a relatively obscure band, I remember there being a lot of Eighth Route Army stickers, graffiti, and punk jacket patches/paintings around Boston in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

in my veins hot music ran

Some pointless reminiscing today, brought on by a late night viewing of Deep Rising on Encore Action. The 1998 film is no great shakes, just one of a multitude of movies employing James Cameron’s “Lifeboat with monsters and machine guns” formula from Aliens, with nothing save a higher gore quotient and Famke Janssen in a wet t-shirt to differentiate it from the pack.

It’s a Big Dumb Movie from a Big Dumb Era, but watching it gave me a twinge of nostalgia for that bygone time. Not that the current era is any smaller or less stupid than the mid-to-late 1990’s, but as the cliché goes, “9/11 changed everything.” Well, 9/11 and the collapse of the Web 1.0 economic bubble, which introduced a mean-spirited, eat or be eaten mentality to the festive atmosphere.

Those years, roughly encompassed by Clinton’s second term, were a good time for me, despite some personal setbacks that turned out to be blessings in disguise. In the fall of 1997, I quit/was thrown out of graduate school for calling the interim American Studies program director’s bluff after I made a complaint about how the program was being run. (It ended with me calling the professor a “pencil-neck” and telling him that I thought the program was shit, which it was.) I hit the ground running, though, and switched to full time status at work, thus doubling my disposable income while freeing up other, more important parts of my schedule.

There were ample opportunities to squander those dollars, too. I amassed a fairly large collection of import and domestic Playstation and Saturn games and related ephemera such as game soundtracks and art books. This was also when my massive comic book back issue buying spree began. Armed with a list culled from a dog-eared copy of the previous year’s Overstreet Price Guide, I made an aggressive effort to reclaim and repurchase the various individual comics and series that I had either enjoyed and lost track of or missed on during my youth. The fact that I found complete runs of a lot of those comics still in pristine condition in various quarter bins speaks volumes about my childhood tastes.

That era was the last time I was actually enthusiastic about the current pop music scene, and by “enthusiastic,” I mean reading Spin and the like without the reflexive, jaded sighs and shaking on the head that the Andrew of 2007 displays on such occasions. (It doesn’t help that so many features and reviews of today’s bands read like they were generated by a computer program designed to simply swap in and out names and influences from a stock template. REMOVE: Smashing Pumpkins, ADD: Mars Volta, REMOVE: Velvet Underground, ADD: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, INSERT: Banal popcult reference, END TASK.)

As I wrote back in May 2006 in my post on the music used in the WipeOut series of games:

…the late 1990's, when the swing revival, electronica, and third-wave ska battled it out in the pop music arena for the title of "The Next Big Thing." Of course, the eventual winner of that dubious honor turned out to be teen dance pop, but it was interesting while it lasted.

…and it was interesting to hear something other than the bland, marketable tones of AOA (Adult-Oriented Alternative, aka “Yacht Rock for the coffeehouse generation”) acts on the airwaves, even if only for a short while.

Save Ferris – Come on Eileen (from It Means Everything, 1997) – Brandon Flowers of The Killers publicly dismissed The Bravery because some of that band’s members had once been in a ska band (the painfully named Skabba the Hutt). Too bad that it lead to a defamation or libel suit. It would have been the stuff of comedic legend:

“I would like to produce as evidence this high school notebook filled with poems plagiarized from the lyrics of The Cure’s ‘Love Song’ and New Order’s ‘True Faith.’ DNA testing proves that the tear stains on the pages are authentic.”

“Your honor, the suburban teenage girls and wimpster English majors deserve only the most self-righteously authentic pre-packaged and mass marketed angst! That cannot come from a soul tainted by frat boy bluebeat!”

Honestly, that whole cluster of bands (Fall Out Boy, The Killers, Interpol, etc.) can’t get tossed into the dustbin of history soon enough for my satisfaction.

The Crystal Method – Busy Child (from Vegas, 1997) – Does not contain psuedoephedrine.

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies – Zoot Suit Riot (from Zoot Suit Riot, 1997) – Horn sections, complicated dance moves, touches of Latin rhythm… If you think about it, swing is like disco, but with pegged wool trousers instead of polyester flares and a much whiter, middle-class audience.

produce a crazy science fiction creation

Roughly twenty years before Hank Pym got it into his head to dabble in the field of killer atomic robotology, Dr. Charles Langley decided to try his hand at creating a megalomaniacal cybernetic successor to the weak and pathetic human race. The creation of killer robots is an evergreen growth industry in the whimsically improbable world of comics. It’s right up there alongside weather control machines, hypno-ray satellites, and researching ways to destroy killer robots. And who, at some point in their lives, hasn’t considered combining the environmentally-friendly power of a nuclear reactor with the ruthless inhuman efficiency of an artificial intelligence?

Let’s face it, when you’re presenting your work at the 72nd Annual Metropolis Convention of Vaguely Unspecified Science, announcing that you’ve created an ambulatory nuclear furnace with genocidal tendencies has a certain dramatic flair that you just don’t get with some minor breakthrough in stem cell research.

Per the accepted conventions for this sort of business, the quite Devo-ish Langley succeeds in his efforts while inadvertently blowing up his suburban laboratory. (Note to aspiring killer robot makers, be sure that your homeowner’s insurance covers accidental nuclear explosions. You’ll thank yourselves later.) While Langley relaxes beneath a pile of smoldering rubble, his creation decides to check out what’s happening in town.

Now while Mr. Atom, as Langley’s robot has dubbed himself, has gotten off to a promising start on the path of killer robot-dom (what with his creator’s Promethean hubris and all), at this point in his career he isn’t “evil” so much as suffering from a cybernetic form of Asperger’s syndrome. Lacking the capacity to understand basic human interaction, he misinterprets the townspeople’s social cues (in form of having a safe dropped on top of him and getting blindsided by a CoastLiner) as being affirmations of his own perceived superiority.

His inflated sense of self-worth leads him to the United Nations building, where he makes a case for what he sees as his righteous stewardship of the world to the assembled delegates. It goes about as well as you’d think, and ends in a manner tragically familiar to anyone knowledgeable in the pathology of school shootings.

It’s the John Bolton years, minus the bad hairdo, all over again.

While the Danes scramble to come up with an interim replacement delegate, Captain Marvel (aka "The Big Red Cheese") arrives on the scene, having been alerted by the injured Langley about the “really cool” abomination the scientist has "accidentally" let loose on the world. Marvel and Mr. Atom duke it out, but the robot’s atomic power proves to be an equal match for the strength of Hercules and stamina of Atlas. Finally, on the grounds outside of the UN, the two titans dig down deep and give it their all in a brilliantly executed sequence that manages to accomplish more in four panels than Dan Jurgens did in the entire "Death of Superman" arc.

Being down is not the same as being out when one is an indestructible robot, and from the comfort of his cell, Mr. Atom delivers a final rant (presumably accompanied by a mix CD of his favorite Deftones, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein tracks).

All kidding aside, this story, “Captain Marvel Meets Mr, Atom,” from Captain Marvel Adventures #78 (November 1947) is one of my favorite comic stories ever. It’s a fascinating glimpse of early Atomic Age pop culture (also see Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light) that hit the newsstands only two years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The story’s underlying message that the atomic beast would slip its lead and turn on the world came at a time before the first Soviet bomb test, when the United States held a monopoly on atomic weapons. That kind of introspection would soon retreat under the panic-mode thinking of the Red Scare and the formalization of Cold War societal postures.

Looking beyond the story’s popcult significance, I also love the design aesthetic of Mr. Atom. Sleek, streamlined, and metallic, he was populuxe before populuxe existed. I was disappointed that the character was redesigned in the 1990’s with a faux retro look more indicative of current attitudes about the early post war era than of the era itself. At least the Justice League Unlimited version stuck close to the classic design.

I Am Robot and Proud – Learn From Mistakes (from Grace Days, 2003) – Mr. Atom never learned from his. He later tried to assist the Comet Men in their conquest of earth, then got blasted into the future where he and his efforts toward world domination went up in an atomic fireball. Poor sap. Maybe he needed a dose of soothing electronica, such as this track, in his life.

The Scorpions – Robot Man (from In Trance, 1975) – This is how they rocked it in 1970’s Hannover, people. The Epoxies did a superlative cover of this song on 2005’s Stop the Future.

Helen Love – Atomic Beat Boy (from Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Musik, 2000) – Indie pop, Ramones fetishism, and techno collide, and the results sound like something from a bemani game. It might be a bit too bubblegum for some folks, but I like it fine...in small doses.

The Blood – Megalomania (from False Gestures for a Devious Public, 1983) – This is the sort of ferocious mix of punk and metal one would expect from a band fronted by a “Cardinal Jesus Hate.”

you can have me for an hour

Between catching up with four days of work and the hellish ninety-minute (usually accomplished inside twenty) commute home, I just don’t have the energy or desire to put together today’s originally planned post.

I guess we’ll just have to settle for a couple of tracks by Satisfact, one of a handful of mid-90’s American bands (along with the Pulsars and Servotron) who tried their hand at 80’s revivalism and were rewarded with the resounding apathy of the record buying public. (If they had debuted a decade later, it might have been a different story.)

Satisfact’s sound is a mélange of 80’s alt-rock influences, worn perhaps a bit too proudly on the band’s collective sleeve. Listening to the band’s first album, the presciently-titled The Unwanted Sounds of Satisfact, one can clearly pick out clear traces and snatches “borrowed” from the Cure, the Smiths, OMD, Bauhaus, and Joy Division. (In a bit of hubris that just begs for divine retribution, the album’s cover shamelessly mimics that of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures LP.)

It’s certainly listenable and, for less dogmatic fans of the source material, fairly enjoyable stuff, but it too often feels as if one is listening to an 80’s alt-gloom cover band that got it in their heads to record an album of “original” material. Allmusic.com gave it a glowing review, but it also used the word “doon” while doing so and thus cannot be trusted.

From The Unwanted Sounds of Satisfact (1996):

Satisfact – Dysfunction

Satisfact - Oscillator

input/output

As I mentioned in the Firestorm post, our attachment to things from our childhood tends to be predicated on personal context (i.e. simple nostalgia or other associative factors) and the sad fact our younger selves lacked the capacity to know crap when they saw, heard, or ate it. That’s not a dismissal; it’s an important part of the growing up process, empirically developing internal filters to separate sheep from goats. It leaves splinters, though, pockets of exceptionalism that get carried into our adult lives.

For a many a kid who came of age in the Golden Era of Videogames (roughly 1977-1984), the 1982 movie Tron is something of a holy text. It’s innovative art direction, pioneering use of CGI, and excellent console and arcade game tie-ins perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the brave new world of digital entertainment.

As with other popular franchises of that period, there have been efforts -- a couple videogames, a comic book, and re-release the old toys -- to recapitalize on its magic as a means of parting nostalgic adults from their disposable income. None have been particularly successful, but the old affection still remains.

I consider myself a fan of the franchise (well, as much as a notorious stick in the mud can be a “fan” of anything), but I have a hard time getting around one bitter realization: the movie is a retread of old Christian epics, with light cycles taking the place of chariots. From the epistemological discussion of the relationship between the creator (“users”) and creations (“programs”), to Flynn’s godhood made digitally incarnate, to the mention of prophecies and portents, Tron is as much an theological delivery system as the Narnia novels are. Like my discovery of the ideology behind those C.S. Lewis books, the realization left a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s not the message so much as the oblique means of delivery. Despite being a “filthy little atheist,” I think Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments is a delightful film, even if I think the theology is a load of hokum. I’m less charitable when someone tries to slip some covert propaganda using the pretext of disposable entertainment. (This is also why I’ve never warmed up to vegetarian meat substitutes. If the food is tasty enough to justify eating it, it shouldn’t have to wear a mask.) Art is by definition manipulative, but I draw the line at being slipped an ideological roofie.

I won’t say the film has been spoiled for me (there’s that aforementioned exceptionalism in play), but it has diminished the film’s entertainment value by a noticeable degree. My love for the Wendy Carlos score remains unchanged, however. Now I just need to find a way to reconcile the film’s Christian undertones with friend Zartan’s shocking expose of Tron sex (Not a hoax! Not a slashfic!).

That article, along with the other many fine pieces he wrote for the late, lamented Zeroes Unlimited, was one of the earliest inspirations that eventually led to the creation of Armagideon Time. In honor of that, here are three obscure synth/new wave tracks that I think of as being the Tron universe equivalents to a Barry White LP.

JYL – Computer Love (from JYL, 1984)

The Metronomes – A Circuit Like Me (from a 1980 single)

The Units – Digital Stimulation (from Digital Stimulation, 1980)

I saw it in books and read it on TV

It’s a snowy Valentine’s Day here at Armagideon Time’s HQ northwest of Boston, and despite the all the sweeping, shoveling, and sanding, it’s rather nice. The wife planned for the blizzard in advance, so we’re just going to ride out the storm all snug and cozy-like. Later we’ll have a home-cooked pasta dinner and watch one of our favorite films on DVD. It might not seem that exciting, but it I think it’s damn near perfect.

In honor of the day, here’s a double dose of new wave lovin’ for your listening pleasure.

Thompson Twins – If You Were Here (from Quick Step & Side Kick, 1983) – The only Thompson Twins song I can bear to listen to is also the song that plays during the conclusion of Sixteen Candles. It’s a case of romantic-by-association, because the song’s lyrics are actually pretty glum.

A Flock of Seagulls – Space Age Love Song (from A Flock of Seagulls, 1982) – There is no futurism like 1980’s futurism. (Or 1970’s futurism, for that matter, but that topic is best avoided unless one has a fetish for the color orange or an unhealthy interest in seeing Dick Van Patten attend a Roman robot orgy.)

For those unfortunate souls that are spending this day recovering from being gutshot and left to die by Cupid, this track might be more your speed:

The Pagans – What’s This Shit Called Love? (from a 1978 single, collected on The Pink Album...Plus, 2001) - Raw, ugly, yet surprisingly melodic garage punk out of Cleveland.

blazing noggins and other childhood pursuits

'Stormy's so emo.

It’s time to dip down once again into the Well of Nerdity; its waters possessing the Lethe-like power to make folks forget all semblance of rationality or proportionality.

The comic fans among my readers should be acquainted with the concept of “fan entitlement,” the excessive proprietary interest fans take in their fictional characters of choice, and frequently manifested as online rantings of the shrillest sort should official plot developments deviate from their personal Platonic ideals. In saner circles of fandom, fan entitlement arguments are usually dismissed out of hand (a la Godwin’s Law), although I can occasionally muster up an iota of sympathy for the aggrieved ones’ pain, if not their methodology.

Serial entertainment, such superhero comics or soap operas, depends on a sense of continuity of character, rather than plots (which will inevitable be recycled over time), to retain its audience’s attention. When someone buys a ticket to a Bond film, one expects to see the adventures of a suave, British spy and not, say, a Romanian cyborg with a eye that shoots laser beams. Tweaks and other minor refinements are to be expected in order to keep things fresh over the long haul, but it is assumed that the core concept will remain immutable.

Eventually, though, this steady state runs up against the business version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: franchise entropy and its ubiquitous handmaiden, diminishing returns. It’s a bigger problem in superhero comics than other forms of media, because the graying audience for that material has gotten smaller over time, and currently lacks the feeder markets by which to effectively bring in new readers.

So, in order to reignite interest and spark sales, periodic shake ups -- individual reboots or line-wide events -- have become the solution of choice. Characters live, characters die, some characters will be changed forever, and all that jazz. It’s the idea of continuous revolution as applied to the spandex set, and in the midst of all these goings-on, it’s inevitable that certain fans’ toes will get stepped on. When you’ve lived (and read comics) for as long as I’ve had, it’s not so difficult to look at these turns of the wheel from a metaphysical, fatalist frame of reference; today’s massive changes are tomorrow’s deletions.

Some fans, however, can’t (or won’t) bring themselves to look at the big picture where entertainment and commerce intersect, and treat each change as a personal affront. Even worse, for every soul who has a sincere fondness for “Character X,” there are dozens of others with little sense of history of or personal attachment to Character X who hop on the fan entitlement bandwagon with a variety of sharp implements to grind at the ready.

It’s much ado about nothing, this staking of one’s self to the vicissitudes of disposable entertainment, and, heck, as it has been said many times, the changes don’t invalidate the entertainment value of the original stories…although that value might have certain unconsidered qualifiers.

Firestorm, “The Nuclear Man,” was the brainchild of writer Gerry Conway and artist Al Milgrom. The character was the superheroic gestalt of high school jock Ronnie Raymond and physicist Martin Stein, who were caught in a nuclear accident and via the power of “fusion” gained the power to combine into a single superbeing with Ronnie in the driver’s seat and Stein acting as a disembodied mentor. He debuted in his own title in 1978, which lasted five issues before getting axed during the corporate retrenchment dubbed the “DC Implosion”.

Conway brought the character back as the member of the Justice League (the last member to join the “Satellite Era” incarnation of the team) and as a back up feature in the Flash’s monthly series. He was given his own solo title again, The Fury of Firestorm, in 1982 featuring artwork by Pat Broderick (on and off) for the first year and a half or so.

In the late 80’s, writer John Ostrander took the title in a bizarre direction involving Cold War politics and Swamp Thing-inspired ideas about elemental beings. After the title folded in 1990, the character spent a number of years in the b-lister wilderness before being killed off during Identity Crisis and replaced with a newer version of the character.

I got Fury of Firestorm #6 in a trade with a friend when I was eleven years old, which just the right age level for the material. The character’s excessively complicated origin/power/costume and, most importantly, his sense of “newness” was just what my young fanboy self was looking for. This was around the time I started to have the means to follow monthly titles, rather than rely on parent-purchased back issues from flea markets, and I made the effort to follow the series up until Ostrander took the title in a new direction.

I still have the run in one of my back issue boxes, the gaps having been filled during my back issue buying frenzy in the mid-90’s, While I still enjoy reading them, I’ve come to realize that my enjoyment is associative in nature. If I had come into possession of the comics this morning, or shot up with a nostalgia-blocking neurochemical before reading them, I’d consider the stories mediocre at best, even with my legendary tolerance for what laymen call “crap.”

Conway’s Firestorm stories are painfully obvious reworkings of his work on Marvel’s Spider-Man books, with the requisite doses of youthful angst and the genre equivalent of “real life problems.” His attempts to tweak the old formula, such as making Ronnie Raymond a jock whose high school nemesis is a nerd, are transparent and laughable. It’s also unclear whether he grasped the full implications of the gestalt nature of Firestorm’s superheroic identity, opening up a whole world of interesting subtexts and outright creepiness. (Then there’s the revelation that Sandy Duncan was the original drummer for The Clash…)

Yet I still love those comics, because they remind me of bike riding with my friends down the dirt tracks that used to crisscross North Woburn, of four-player games of Warlords on the Atari 2600, of picnic table speculations about Revenge of the Jedi, and of listening to “Mr. Roboto” and “Come on Eileen” on the local Top 40 radio station. No retcons, reboots, or shock value deaths will change that. Affection doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. When it comes to comics fandom, the world would be a saner place if it wasn’t.

John Foxx – Fusion/Fission (from The Garden, 1981) – Foxx was the original frontman for Ultravox, and you can hear traces of that band’s sound, with a slightly darker tone, on this track.

+/- - Setting Your Head on Fire (from Self-Titled Long Playing Debut Album, 2002) – I’m torn on this one. It’s a very nice bit of indie pop with some electronic elements, yet the band’s “clever” use of symbols for a name irritates the hell out of me and makes it very hard to label their mp3 files and run web searches (as + and – are often used as search qualifiers).

Spice Girls – 2 Become 1 (from Spice, 1996) – For more Spice-y thoughts, check out Tim O’Neil’s ruminations regarding ten years on a Spice World.

everything we crave will be inside

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on my last post. I felt a little dizzy from all the praise, but the consensus was that whatever I’m doing here is working for you folks. That’s nice to know, as I’m too complacent and old to change my ways at this point.

No real theme for today’s posts, just a collection of random thoughts with musical accompaniment.

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Concerning last night’s Grammy Awards:

I’m not a fan of The Police, as I consider them the kind of “new wave” music that my parents would listen to (also see The Eurythmics). However, for all the hullabaloo surrounding their reunion appearance, I was expecting something other than “Roxanne,” a song so overplayed and over-referenced that it has become more of a punchline (Scrantonicity! Woo!) than an actual song.

It would have been nice if, instead of pandering to public expectations, the band came out swinging with something a bit more unexpected and challenging, like this track:

The Police – Synchronicity II (from Synchronicity, 1983) – My love for this song has nothing to do with musical aesthetics, and everything to do with its ability to act as a mnemonic macro capable of calling up all the wonders and terrors of an early 80’s childhood. I don’t know why my brain chose to place a nostalgia trigger in this song, and not a better-loved track from that era, unless it’s somehow linked to the way I associate certain 70’s TV actors with the smells of various deli meats and cheeses.

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Speaking of 70’s TV, some kind soul has uploaded a condensed version of the notorious “punk rock” episode of ChiP's to YouTube. It’s a panic-mongering mainstream take on youth subculture (as pioneered by Jack Webb and countless “educational” films with titles like “Hippies: Smelly Red Dupes”) that would have had me seeing red back in my full on punk days, but now I think it’s hilarious as fuck, and as a bonus features a woman dressed like a streetwalking Raggedy Ann doll. Here’s the first part:



The rest can be found here and here. KEEP ON PUNKING!

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This might be old news to some of you, but Irdial-Discs has made The Conet Project, a four CD set of shortwave number station recordings, available for free (with a .pdf of the accompanying booklet) at their website. I first found out about these mysterious transmissions and other shortwave anomalies through William Poundstone’s Big Secrets, but lacked the means to listen to the actual thing until I stumbled across these recordings. The written descriptions don’t do the genuine articles justice. There is something fascinating and unsettling about these multilingual alphanumeric recitations and electronic blip tones, leaving one with the feeling that they are eavesdropping on the static-distorted conversations of upper band phantoms.

Here are two sample recordings from the set:

The Swedish Rhapsody

High Pitch Polytone

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While I’m digging into my bag of odds and ends, I’d like to put a plug in for The Dents, a local punk band that my wife has been raving about since she caught them during the intermission of last Saturday’s Boston/Philly roller derby bout. The Dents play tight melodic punk rock with some killer harmonies; just the sort of music my wife goes ga-ga for. You find out more about band (and score some sample mp3s) at their website.

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…and finally, because I feel like it, here’s some nifty bubblegum pop and rock courtesy of the Saturday morning cartoon universe.

The Banana Splits – I’m Gonna Find a Cave (from We’re the Banana Splits, 1968) – How is it that four guys in psychedelic animal costumes, fronting for some session musicians (including Al Kooper, Gene Pitney, and Barry White), managed to create music that exceeds the entertainment quotient of current Top 40 artists by a factor of ten?

Josie & The Pussycats – Stop Look and Listen (from Josie & The Pussycats, 1970) – The slightly scatterbrained Pussycat drummer, Melody, was my first childhood crush, along with the girl who played Becky Thatcher on The New Adventures of Huck Finn. “Blondes, always blondes,” says my very dark-haired wife. Hey, it’s not the girl you bring to the dance; it’s the girl you leave with that matters.

where it’s going no one knows

I’m going to go out on a limb today and do something that could possibly a mistake. (Let me rephrase that: I know it’s going to be a mistake.) Between Kevin’s and Laura’s and Mike’s notes on the subject of blogging, I’ve been in a meta state of mind about what it is exactly I’m doing here.

This whole operation has been an extended experiment in seat-of-my-pants flying from the get-go, with nothing really ever being planned past the frontiers of whatever whim or metaphorical shiny object that has grabbed my attention at any given moment. The site’s design – a stock blogger template with some minor tweaks -- reflects my “live in the moment” ethos, despite the nagging feeling that I could, and should, be doing something more than settling for the least effort-intensive course of action. (It’s a moot point for now, since I made the hasty decision to upgrade to the latest version of Blogger, which is an evolutionary dead end as far as radical design changes or jumps to Wordpress go.)

And yet I’ve seemed to (modestly) succeed in spite of all this. If the logs aren’t lying to me, Armagideon Time has a fair number of regular visitors amidst the crowds of folks swooping in for the music files. Various AT posts have been referenced and linked to by the likes of the blogging arms of The Providence Journal, VH1's Best Week Ever (twice), and USAToday. I’ve had the surreal sensations of seeing myself quoted in the print edition of the Boston Globe and having my write up on the Anemic Boyfriends cited as if I was some voice of authority. Not bad for an insecure basket case who instinctively recoils at the idea of aggressive-self promotion I suppose, but I’m notoriously ambivalent about these things.

While I always welcome feedback and comments on what I post here, I don’t go out of my way to elicit them because, again, it’s not in my nature to be that “forward.” (I admit that I’m sparing with my comments on other people’s sites, preferring to observe Honest Abe’s dictum, “’Tis better to keep one’s mouth closed and be thought a fool, that to open it and remove all doubt.” I have AT to display my foolishness to the world; there is no need to spread the contamination to other folks’ sites.) If I really wanted to, I could direct some more criticisms at The Smiths and/or Joy Division to generate responses. That’s one lesson I’ve learned during my time here.

However, getting back to that “fair number of regular visitors” I mentioned above, I thought I’d use this opportunity to pop my head out my shell and invite any and all of said regular visitors to speak up and introduce yourselves, and tell me what I’m doing right or wrong in your eyes. I meant to ask this during National De-Lurking Week and/or for my 200th post, but my plans got shelved in the midst of my extended illness and the monkey theme week.

I’m painfully aware that this reeks of “LOVE ME!” brand desperation, which, honestly isn’t the point at all. The truth is that I’m curious about the type of person who would come back for repeat helpings of my patented awkward mix of autobiographical, confessional, and obsession-of-the-moment meanderings. Afterwards, we can get forget it ever happened and return to more typical fare, with some minor adjustments and course corrections based on whatever feedback you may provide.

MC5 – I Can Only Give You Everything (from a 1967 single, collected on Big Bang: The Best of the MC5, 2000) – Except the first twelve issues of American Flagg! Or my copy of Valkyrie Profile for the PS1. Or my Wall of Voodoo Dark Continent LP. The rest is up for grabs, though.

Nick Lowe – And So It Goes (from Jesus of Cool, 1978) – One of my all-time favorite songs, it came damn near close to being spoiled for me forever. A few years ago, I was helping a friend move some stuff from a storage unit in Revere to his apartment in Boston, and during the ride back to his place this track came up on my driving music mix CD. My friend began to sing along to it rather loudly in a rushed, nasally sing-song voice that compressed the chorus into “sew-weet-gooze”. The aural experience was akin to undergoing a lumbar puncture procedure performed by a meth-addict with a meat skewer. (To be fair, this was shortly after I purchased Super Lumina, and hadn’t yet figured out the intricacies of her automatic seat adjustment controls.)

I’ve since managed put the horror behind me, but my wife still feels compelled to sing the revised chorus whenever she hears the song.

the dead shed no tears for the living

Jim Corrigan is a tough-as-nails police detective.

He is also the Spectre, an undead angel of vengeance.

He may seem unhappy with his lot, but approaches his ordained task with great creativity.

Great creativity.

Bottom line: Don’t fuck with the Spectre.

Seriously.

(click on a picture to enlarge)

I was eight years old when I first came across writer Michael Fleisher and artist Jim Aparo’s “Wrath of the Spectre” run in Adventure Comics, and the stories terrified and amazed me with their moralistic brutality and the graphic depictions of the Spectre’s brand of divine retribution.

It was the lone-wolf-versus-a-degenerate-society ethos of Dirty Harry’s world, married to both the absurd vigilante melodrama of the superhero genre and the ghoulish morality tales of the old EC horror comics. It worked extremely well, especially in the eyes of a kid raised on the predictable beats of stories where Superman goes up yet again against the likes of Terra-Man or Vartox.

While the stories may feel quaint to readers accustomed to the more sophisticated fare of Infinite Crisis or Civil War, these horror tales in superheroic drag still make for an entertaining and occasionally (mildly) shocking read. DC Comics, rumored to be uncomfortable with the subject matter, cancelled the run after ten issues. The remaining plotted but not penciled installments in the series were later completed by Aparo and printed in a miniseries collection of the entire run, titled Wrath of the Spectre, in 1988. The whole shebang has since been given the trade paperback treatment for your convenience and reading enjoyment. Highly recommended.

Royal Trux – The Spectre (from Cats & Dogs, 1993) – From the half of Pussy Galore that didn’t go on to become the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, here’s a short-but-sweet slice of rootsy lo-fi rock that reminds me of something X might have recorded if they debuted in the early 90’s.

The Psychedelic Furs – The Ghost in You (from Mirror Moves, 1984) – Richard Butler always struck me as Johnny Rotten’s dreamier, art school-attending older brother.

New Model Army – Vengeance (from Vengeance, 1984) – NMA is a hard band to pin down. Arguably punk rock, but one can also hear elements of postpunk and protest folk in the mix. It’s been years since I’ve given this track a listen and I had forgotten how dour the band sounded. Crass’s material comes off as light-hearted in comparison.

Play Dead – Judgement (from Company of Justice, 1985) – More forgotten 80’s goth music. The tribal drum beats are pretty swell, even if the rest of the song is fairly generic genre material.

another dumb casualty

I’ve long been fascinated with the concept of celebrity as it ties into the American Dream. The life and death of Elvis Presley serves as an ur-text in this regard – a poor kid makes it big, only to be destroyed by the currents stirred up by his own success. Fame and fortune come at a cost.

The idea that the unknown and the poor are intrinsically happier than the rich and famous may be a romantic fallacy, but money’s ability to buy happiness is limited. Some voids cannot be filled via the massive expenditure of cash, no matter what the legions of consultants, personal assistants, advisors, and other types of hangers-on may whisper in one’s ear.

A couple posts back I referred to Sid Vicious’s life as being “the Elvis Presley story as written by Charles Bukowski.” I suppose that would make Anna Nicole Smith’s life the Grace Kelly story as directed by John Waters, a tragic farce of a Cinderella story with equal measures of pathos and absurdity.

I really pity that poor baby she left behind. That kid is going to be part of the largest dynastic struggle since the Lancasters and Yorks threw down in the 15th Century.

INXS – Suicide Blonde (from X, 1990) - This track was supposedly inspired by singer Michael Hutchence’s ex-girlfriend, the talented and lovely Kylie Minogue.

Julie Brown – ‘Cause I’m a Blonde (from the Goddess In Progress EP, 1984) – Two LPs I regret not picking up in the early 90’s salad years of cheap vinyl are the Earth Girls Are Easy OST (which featured this track) and the Bachelor Party OST. I don’t care much for either film, but both featured a lot of interesting and otherwise unavailable songs.

Kim Wilde – Love Blonde (from a 1983 single, collected on The Singles Collection 1981-1993) – From “Kids in America” and “Chequered Love” to this soulless wannabe torch song? So depressing. So, so, depressing.

The song did get me wondering about the existence of “hate blondes.” I’ve narrowed the candidates down to this fellow and this gal.