a stray thread of memory

UMass Boston is situated on Columbia Point, an artificially-augmented peninsula jutting out into the Dorchester Bay side of Boston Harbor, which means that my alma mater offers an amazing ringside view whenever a storm rolls in off the Atlantic. During major meteorological events, the storm surge can be strong enough to swamp parts of Morrissey Boulevard, forcing a closure of the road and sometimes even the campus itself.

That's what happened on October 30, 1991, when the Halloween Nor'easter (a.k.a. the "No Name Storm" a.k.a. the "Perfect Storm") slammed into the New England coastline. Up in the windowless clubrooms and offices on the fourth floor of Wheatley Hall, my small group of friends and I had no idea of what was going down until someone stopped by to tell us that Morrissey was closed off, and that we'd better skedaddle before things got any worse.

My girlfriend at the time and I, along with two of our friends, hopped on the shuttle bus to the JFK/UMass subway station. We made it as far as the Bank of Boston offices on the corner of Mt. Vernon Street before the gridlock, which stretched up and around the Day Boulevard rotary and back through the South Boston waterfront, became so impenetrable that the bus driver opened the doors and told us to walk the rest of the way to the subway station.

The rain hadn't started yet, but the wind off the ocean had already reached gale force levels, forcing us to crab-walk the last couple of blocks to the station. The northbound Red Line train was empty, save for my group, a middle-aged townie, and a twitchy street person. At some point during the long, stop-and-go stretch between Broadway and South Station, the street person stumbled over to the doors of the car and started to pound on them with his fists.

Then he unzipped his fly and pissed on the floor of the car, howling "God forgive me" over and over as the puddle of urine spread beneath him. Eventually the townie looked up from his copy of the Herald and barked "Yer forgiven! NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

A group of yuppies got on the train when we finally arrived at South Station. They stood in a group by the doors, their designer shoes smack dab in the middle of Piss Lake. "Hey, someone must have spilled something!" one said, the the rest of the completely oblivious group chuckled at the non-joke. I suppose I could have clued them in, but it was too entertaining a spectacle to spoil.

My girlfriend lived in Jamaica Plain, so I saw her off at the southbound Orange Line platform before catching a another northbound Red Line train to Alewife. Even though it was mid-afternoon and Downtown Crossing is a major public transit hub, the place was a ghost town. Even the street musicians and the folks who sold incense and Afrocentric pamphlets by the shuttered snack bar had packed it in and called it a day.

And I thought to myself, as I attempted (and failed) to sit on one of the platform's non-functional granite seat-sculptures, that this is how the end of the world will probably feel like.

(I also had no idea that thirteen years later to the day, on another stormy afternoon, I'd be exchanging marriage vows with a girlfriend-yet-to-be.)

As for the musical annotations, here's a double shot of postpunk, my genre of choice in the autumn of 1991....and for every autumn since then. The chill in the air and the ever-lengthening evenings add the right touch of environmental synergy for appreciating coldly minimalist soundscapes, don't you think?

Cabaret Voltaire - Premonition (from The Voice of America, 1980)

Joy Division - Shadowplay (from Unknown Pleasures, 1979)

(More Red Line inspired hijinx here.)

do you remember when we met

Today we have yet another post commemorating a significant personal event, in this case the sixteenth anniversary of my first date with the woman who would eventually become my wife. Because our engagement lasted twelve years before we finally got around to legally formalizing our pairing, we tend to view December 7 as our "real" anniversary (not that we give October 30 short shrift -- any excuse to dine out is all right in Maura's book).

It's my fault, though, that the anniversary falls in the grim first week for December, and not a balmy day in late spring or early autumn. How I was to know that when a college classmate gave me her phone number and address on the last day of the spring semester, it meant she was interested in me? Or when she gave me (and only me) a present (a Bubblegum Crisis t-shirt from a con she attended) when I ran into her on the first day of fall classes? Or after she gave me a bunch of old punk and new wave buttons, records, and books...at which point I asked another girl in our collegiate circle out on a date?

"I wanted to punch you in the ribs so hard. I could hear the sound of them cracking in my head," Maura later told me, but the question is whether someone as osmium-dense as I was back then would have even registered the pain from such a blow. I was eventually saved by my own youthful obnoxiousness ("character flaw," my ascot) and things resumed their predestined course after a six-week interregnum.

Thus, on December 7, 1991, I found myself on sitting on a bench in Copley Plaza, reading King Solomon's Mines while hoping Maura would show up in time for the 7:00 PM showing of Beauty and the Beast. It was my first exposure to the chronic lateness that is my beloved's trademark as much as her strong sense of compassion and her ability to deliver a killer roundhouse kick are. But the old saying is true -- Good things come to those who wait.

Or in this case replace "good" with "the best thing that ever happened to me."

Club of Two, forever and always.

When working out the musical portion of today's post, my first thought was to go with the song that had been stuck in my head that fateful evening...

Blitz - Razors in the Night (from the b-side of the 1982 "Never Surrender" 7"; collected on Singles and Rarities: 1980-1983, 2001)

...which rivals anything by Bachrach and David in terms of romantic allure, but I was worried that it might give people the wrong impression. In the end, my wife and I each picked a song we felt best fit the occasion.

Maura went with Exene Cervenka's ode to love amongst the bohemian ruins...

X - Because I Do (from Under the Big Black Sun, 1982)

...while I opted to compound my retrological sins with this eighties cover of a 1959 Phil Phillips R&B hit by former members of a 70's rock supergroup (Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, with ex-Yardbird Jeff Beck)...

The Honeydrippers - Sea of Love (from The Honeydrippers: Volume One, 1984)

...even if the wife is more partial to Plant's "In the Mood." Besides exceeding the recommended daily allowance of romantic dreaminess, the "Sea of Love" was also the first track on the inaugral mix CD I burned for my semi-trusty chariot, Super Lumina, and the song that played as I drove her off the dealer's lot and into the pages of history.

in 1978, an aspiring chef was given a ring of power by a dying alien

A watershed moment in my political education occurred during a protest against the first Gulf War, way back in 1991. People from all around the region had gathered in front of the Federal Building in Boston’s Government Center to express their disapproval of Bush the Elder’s “splendid little war,” and being of the same frame of mind and nothing better to do that day, I joined them.

It was an interesting experience, but in hindsight I’ve realized how choreographed the affair truly was on both sides of the barricades. The police set up a “straw man” line of gates far out from the building with the understanding that the protestors were going to push closer, and so factored a false concession into their crowd control procedure. (Somewhere, in some photojournalist’s file cabinet or FBI anti-subversive database is a picture of an 18 year old Andrew on the verge of doing a faceplant after getting his boot caught on one of the riot fences.)

The protest itself was a tepid mix of warmed over Vietnam Era platitudes and sincere yet inarticulate convictions. For my part, I merely chanted the lyrics to some anti-war punk songs where I swapped in more topical names and places. (I was photographed a lot that day. I don’t know why, except that I was a colorfully costumed punk rocker at a time when that subculture was at its lowest ebb around these parts.) The demonstration may not have been effective, but it was cathartic, and that’s a far better alternative to giving in to despair.

Then the fucking professional socialists showed up and it all turned to shit. Where the gathering had started as an unfocused howl of protest, the socialists brought order, and queueing, and “You people would be more effective over here, and you folks over there, and would anyone like to volunteer to risk arrest on our behalf because we don’t want to miss Seinfel—I mean the 5th Internationalists cell meeting tonight.” I’m generally sympathetic to the socialists’ ideology, although my own views run more toward a pragmatic egalitarian idealism. (Slow trickles of water have brought entire mountain ranges down, while rigidly overreaching dogma about revolutionary change ends up benefiting only vultures and other carrion eaters when put into practice. I won’t compromise on the idea of equal rights, though. That issue is a no-brainer.) That said, I’ve yet to meet a capital “S” Socialist I could tolerate for more than thirty seconds.

After they had insinuated themselves into the protest, the socialist faction had the crowd move away from the federal building so that they could be lectured on a broad series of topics completely unrelated to the present concern. As they launched into their ideological laundry list, I could see a large number of attendees make puzzled faces at each other. The crowd gradually began to disperse, as small groups of folks who came out to express their disapproval of Bush the Elder’s military adventurism drifted off towards either Quincy Market or the nearby subway station.

In hijacking the discussion in order to grind their own axes, the socialists had effectively killed it.

Which brings us to the second issue of Mark Waid and George Perez’s The Brave and the Bold relaunch. The book has been garnering a lot of positive reviews, and quite justifiably so. It’s great to see Perez’s excellent art again on a monthly basis, and the book does capture that old fashioned DC magic that’s been missing from too many of the company’s titles in recent years. At the same time, though, it’s a lot like catching a performance by Midnight Train, a tribute band dedicated to “the magic of Journey.” The songs are played note perfect, but all one is really getting is a hyper-polished simulacrum of familiar material. (Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, on the other hand, has a Nouvelle Vague feel to it, using familiar material as a springboard to launch into new and interesting directions.)

I cut my comics-reading teeth on Bob Haney’s 1970’s B&B run, and there was a mad sense of “anything goes” to those old stories, logic be damned. The current series, by contrast, feels like a calculated, sterile recreation of the old material along the lines of Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you asking, “how do these half-assed musical analogies tie back to your anecdote about socialists?” By way of this, my friends.

I do get what Waid is trying to do here, Kara’s schoolgirl crush on one of her “big brother’s” cool pals. It’s a plausible bit of characterization, and Green Lantern does a creditable job of setting her straight on why she needs to put a stop to it. What I don’t understand is why Green Lantern has to repeatedly remind himself that Supergirl is “17.” Or rather, “17, 17, 17, 17, 17” as it continues on subsequent pages.

It adds an element of creepiness to the story for the sake of a clichéd comedic trope. The “statutory rape temptation” gag was tired in when it was used in Three’s Company, nearly three decades ago. (Although, I’d love to see GL taking a cold shower, then having a meeting with Superman at the Regal Beagle where he malaprops his way through a series of lame sexual double entendres while explaining what happened on the mission.) It’s time for those kinds of jokes to take their place on the “unpleasant humor of the past” shelf next to quips about women drivers and the entirety of Don Rickles’ routine.

There’s a tendency within the comics internet to use the indignation wagon as a Trojan Horse for less lofty objectives, such as attacking a certain creator or company one has a grudge against. Like with the protest I mentioned, issues that do deserve discussion get hijacked and manipulated, spurring backlashes that toss the babies out with the bathwater. There are also the procrustean beds of the conspiracy theorists, where lines between cluelessness and malice get blurred for the sake of a grand unified theory of that most sexy of beasts, the “hidden agenda.” Ignorance is not a defense, but the remedies are different for deliberate acts and for passive offensiveness. I’m not asserting that broader agendas are a myth, but that aggregated institutional cultures should not automatically be taken as an active conspiracy.

There is a lot that is shitty about comics, especially in the superhero genre these days, but it’s ludicrous to think a bunch of shrill jihads which too often mask personal vendettas or delusions of fan entitlement will bring about change for the better.

Someone who has once had a fork jammed into his or her eye will come away from reading an issue of Jams-Forks-In-People’s-Eyes Man with a completely different take on the subject matter than someone who has made through life without that unfortunate experience. Part of why The Brave and the Bold #2 skeeved me out as much as it did is because I have had the misfortune of knowing too many guys with fixations on teenage girls. I’m not talking To Catch a Predator material either, but men who would otherwise give one the impression of being down to earth and reasonable folks…until the conversation turns to the latest underage starlet, popstar, et cetera, and things get very ugly, very quickly. In that personal context, a lame joke in an otherwise decent comic can feel extremely sinister, especially when it doesn’t even need to be there in the first place. This didn’t help, either, even if it arguably served a purpose within the story, though all description -- or illustration -- is necessarily selective.

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap – Young Girl (from Young Girl, 1968) – I used to have a cut-out bin compilation cassette called The Sounds of San Francisco, which featured a bunch of 60’s acts from the Bay Area. This song was on it, and it stuck out like a sore thumb amidst all the psychedelic rock cuts. To this day, every time I hear it, I feel the urge to fast forward to The Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard.” (The Seeds were actually from Los Angeles, but sell-through cheapo compilations bow to no sense of rhyme or reason.)

Steve Lawrence – Go Away, Little Girl (from Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, 2004) – Years ago, I was as some party and there was a drunken metalhead who could have been Steve Lawrence’s twin brother. This fellow’s version Eydie Gorme was a drunk/stoned/insane (?) stripper, and they spent the evening slapping each other in the face and calling each other rude names. It’s funny; I can remember that vividly, but I can barely recall any lines of any of the plays I was supposed to have memorized in college.

D-Day – Too Young To Date (from a 1979 single, collected on New Wave Hits of the 80’s, Vol. 1) – Offering a view from the other side of the gender gap, we have a raunchy slice of power pop out of Austin, Texas.

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

I’m going to pull a Casey Kasem here and congratulate pal Benjamin Birdie for his extra special guest visitor in the comments section of today’s installment of The Rack, the webcomic he and Kevin Church put out every Monday and Friday. Way to go, Benjamin! I’m officially jealous. This track is dedicated to you, my friend.

New Order – Touched by the Hand of God (from a 1987 single, collected/remixed on (The Best of) New Order, 1994) - Is it just me, or does anyone else hear echoes of Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" in those rising orchestral bits of the song?

I know it when I hear it

I mentioned in a previous post that I used to dabble in the visual arts. I had a raw, fairly modest talent for drawing and painting that has long since atrophied into insignificance. Most of blame for that lies with my utter lack of anything even vaguely resembling discipline and my total disdain for repetitive tasks, but the decisive factor that killed any interest I had in becoming an artist was the Drawing 101 class I took as a sophomore in college.

The class was taught by an MBA graduate student who had been an undergrad art major. It would have been just another somnabulatory three-credit cakewalk except for two things. One, the instructor had an insane fondness for R.E.M’s Out of Time, and had the CD on repeat for the entire semester. Prior to this I had no opinion of the band one way or another (although I thought “Radio Free Europe” was rather nice), but over the course of the ten week semester I grew to positively loathe Michael Stipe’s voice.

The second problem with the course was that the instructor set aside fifteen minutes per class for critiquing sessions, and every student was required to contribute their opinions about their classmates’ work. Now I fully understand the importance of peer review, having had my writing (and confidence) picked apart in many creative writing and playwriting classes. In those cases, however, the professors were highly experienced in that sort of activity, and were able to guide the proceedings with subtle, skillful hand, making sure that everyone stayed on target.

The woman teaching the drawing class possessed none of those undergrad wrangling skills, and each critiquing session turned into a community theater production of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Because it was an intro level class, there were more than a few non-artistic types who took the class because they thought it would be a fun way to earn graduation credits. The poor saps were mercilessly flayed alive by a vocal minority of asshole art majors with delusions of grandeur: “And what, exactly, is this blobby thing here supposed to be?” It was awful to watch, and because attendance factored into one’s final grade, impossible to avoid.

I ended up skirting the issue of my own participation by saying the same thing about every drawing I was supposed to comment on, “Nice use of shading.” The instructor thought I was being a wiseass, but the truth is I registered for Drawing 101, not Advanced Techniques for Destroying Self-Esteem. In an upper level course, where everyone has a shared commitment to the craft and a sense of the effort involved, an open group critiquing process is an invaluable and frequently humbling learning experience. When conducted by an assortment of arrogant and insecure freshmen and sophomores, it inevitable degenerates into a wilding. There’s an inversely proportional relationship in these things where the folks with the biggest mouths end up having the least substance to offer.

Since I put my contact info in the sidebar, I’ve been getting emails from performers asking me to review their material here. I have to say I’m very flattered by this; it gives me an inflated sense of relevance that I’m not certain I truly deserve. The rub is that anyone familiar with what I’ve been doing here over the past ten months should understand that this is not a music blog per se, but rather an ongoing, rambling exploration of my whims and obsessions, which just happens to feature musical annotations. I’m not comfortable in the role of critic, as it is traditionally understood. It makes me feel like I’m back in the Drawing 101 studio, being asked to deliver a sanctioned ego blow to some poor Organic Chem major who thought it would be fun to take an art class.

I do make the effort to listen to all the music sent my way, and evangelize offsite when I think the sound fits the tastes of friends and other acquaintances, but the nature of this site and of my thought processes precludes reviews in the traditional sense. Should one of the tracks happen to fit into a theme post about Arion, Lord of Atlantis, that’s another matter.

Plushgun – Just Impolite (http://www.myspace.com/plushgun) – This is one of the tracks submitted to me for review, and I’ve developed a real fondness for it. It reminds me a lot of something from the soundtrack to one of the lesser known 80’s teen movies, which is a good thing. (I can’t tell you how many of those old soundtrack LP’s I’ve hunted down for the sake of a single, otherwise unavailable song.) Individual mileage may vary depending on one’s own brand pop sensibility, but I think it holds a good deal of promise and I’m interested in hearing the band’s follow-up efforts.

…and now back to our regular scheduled randomness:

Desperate Bicycles – The Medium Was Tedium (from a 1977 single) – Sloppy early British punk rock recorded on the slimmest of budgets. It’s from a subgenre that would later be termed “DIY” or “messthetics” (taken from Scritti Politti, who pioneered the aesthetic style before morphing into a mainstream pop act).

give us this day all that you showed me

I do a lot of autobiographical and personal anniversary posts on Armagideon Time. For one thing, they’re a convenient frame to cobble some relevant tracks together when I’m feeling lazy. Plus, it has become clear to me that this site has turned out to be more Laurence Sterne than Greil Marcus in tone -- an unending stream of digressions and observations set to music. Based on the traffic logs and user feedback, I guess it works well enough.

Fifteen years ago, on December 7, 1991, Maura (my lovely wife and co-conspirator) and I went on our first date. We saw Beauty and the Beast at the Copley Plaza cinema, and ate greasy pizza at Quincy Market afterwards. (I remember Maura telling a Margaret Dumont-like matron at the next table over that her fur coat looked like a dead dog carcass.)

We parted ways at the Orange Line entrance across from North Station. She gave me a goodnight peck on the cheek, and I crossed Causeway Street to wait for the commuter train back to Woburn. I spent the next half hour on a cold wooden bench trying to concentrate on reading the King Solomon’s Mines paperback I had brought with me, but my mind wouldn’t stop replaying the night events and analyzing them in minute detail.

The Partisans – White Flag (from The Time Was Right, 1984) – The tracks on the studio side of this exceptional LP deal with themes of betrayal, compromise, futility, and frustration. Fitting, considering the album was released while the once vibrant 80’s Britpunk scene began to collapse in on itself. “White Flag” is the sole exception, a love song couched entirely in military terminology.

Ultravox – Hymn (from Quartet, 1982) – One of Maura’s favorites, this track has a strong anime feel to it, evoking images of azure-haired, big-eyed mecha jockeys scrambling to face down the planet-killing dreadnoughts of a sinister alien empire. The song shares its melody with the Zones’ 1979 powerpop song, “Mourning Star.” The Zones evolved out of Silk, a Scottish 70’s teen pop outfit that Ultravox frontman Midge Ure had been also been a member of before joining the Rich Kids and, later, Ultravox.

they won’t fade as time goes by

(your author in 1991, 2nd from the right)

Has it really been fifteen years since the autumn of 1991? I was nineteen then, returning to college as an English literature major after an ill-advised freshman year attempt at majoring in physics. In practice, it merely meant I’d be skipping out on Practical Criticism instead of Calculus II that semester.

My college attendance record, at least for the first half of my undergrad career, was dismal. My friend Leech, a fellow punk rocker who dropped out of college the previous year, and I would meet up every morning and spend our days wandering around Boston. Our regular itinerary involved taking the B Line out to Harvard Ave in Allston, then walking down Comm Ave until it hit Mass Ave, which we then followed all the way to Porter Square before crossing over into Davis Square. We’d check out every used record, vintage clothing, and comic book store we passed along the way, making time to grab some greasy Café Aventura pizza in the Garage at Harvard Square.

Thanks to an overly concerned high school guidance counselor, I was lucky enough to have scored a scholarship for “brilliant, at risk” kids (my family sort of imploded in my junior year, which seemed to effect everyone else more than it did the people actually involved) that gave a generous living expense allotment and didn’t set any minimum academic standards. This meant I was fairly rolling in mad money at the time, most of it getting spent on pizza, videogames, and used vinyl.

It was during that glorious fall of 1991, in between the grease-induced heartburn, stacks of rare punk records, and my failing to live up to my potential, I started dating Maura, the woman who I’d end up marrying (in October 2004, after a twelve-year engagement). That story has been written up in various entries on my journal, so I won’t go over that ground again here. Leech, Maura, and I would hang out, his presence helping to take the pressure off as Maura and I slowly built up confidence in our growing relationship. Unfortunately, Leech saw it as a love triangle scenario, leading to some unnecessary unpleasantness the following spring. That golden fall, however, will always invoke fond memories.

In the spirit of those times, here are some examples of what I was listening to at the time.

Black Flag – My War (from My War, 1984) – I try my hardest to separate the Henry Rollins responsible for this searing piece of pure aggro from Henry Rollins, the posturing self-important buffoon. Occasionally, I succeed.

Joy Division – Interzone (from Unknown Pleasures, 1979) – I was walking across campus the other day when I saw a freshman wearing a t-shirt featuring the cover art from Unknown Pleasures printed in neon rainbow colors. Something died inside me at that moment.

Ministry – Stigmata (from The Land of Rape and Honey, 1988) – Listen to this track, then watch this video from 1983:



This concludes today’s lesson in cognitive dissonance.

The Partisans – Anger and Fear (You’re All Alone Now) (from The Time Was Right, 1984) – No matter how much my musical tastes broaden or evolve, this track maintains its position as my favorite song of all time. I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. It simply is.

Throwing Muses – Not Too Soon (from The Real Ramona, 1991) – An excellent Tanya Donelly track that prefigures the deceptively sweet indie pop sound she would explore with her post-Muses band, Belly.