if a seem a little jittery

A "minor" snow storm rolled into New England today. Because the approaches to AT headquarters on scenic Mt. Misery can get a little dicey in snowy conditions, my wife and I left work early to avoid the worst of it.

We got on I-93 North at the Columbia Road exit at 1:15 PM. We got off the highway at the Medford Square exit around 4:30 in the afternoon. That's eleven miles travelled in the space of three hours and fifteen minutes.

Oh, and I hurt my hand trying to punch a pickup truck through the driver's side window of Super Lumina.

So consider it a minimal content kind of day.

The Nips - So Pissed Off (from Bops, Babes, Booze, and Bovver, 2000) - Shane MacGowan, here fronting his pre-Pogues punk pop band, understands how I feel. It's like we're spiritual brothers, right down to the bad teeth (though I have a comprehensive dental plan in my corner) and the disturbing hissing laugh.

like a dancing flame on a bed of nails

There is something fascinating about Debbi Anderson, the mercurial teenage star of two teen comedy (aka “Archie clone”) titles, Date With Debbi and Debbi’s Dates, published by DC in the late 60’s/early 70’s. The character reminds me of my wife for some reason I just can’t put my finger on. There’s a superficial physical resemblance – short hair, freckles, the shape of the lips – although my wife’s hair is dark brown with chestnut highlights, not red, and she eschews flares and fringe in favor of jeans and punk rock/roller derby t-shirts.

Nah, it’s something else…

…like a short temper and propensity toward impulsive violence! That’s what it is!

I’m kidding (sort of). My wife is a very sweet, loving person who reserves her ample stores of ire for people and things that deserve it. As long as I’m not on the receiving end, it’s rather nice to be partnered with a ferocious angel of vengeance. Who says road rage can’t be a couples’ activity? (It’s safer, too, because I don’t need to take my hands off the wheel to flip asshole drivers off anymore. The lady has it covered.)

It can get a little terrifying on occasion, like when she threw a bowl out a second story window because it fell off the shelf “one too many times,” but it keeps domestic life interesting, to say the least.

The Pop Group – She Is Beyond Good and Evil (from Y, 1979) – Like an elemental force that cannot be constrained, only borne witness to… Wait; am I talking about this song or my wife’s temper?

Talulah Gosh – Break Your Face (from Backwash, 1996) – There is more sweet, melodic pop crammed into this one minute and fifteen seconds than in the entire discographies of lesser bands.

The Yachts – Look Back in Love (Not in Anger) (from The Yachts, 1979) – Not to be confused with “Yacht Rock,” this is a very retro-sounding slice (love those organ riffs!) of early British new wave.

Brigitte Handley – Mad at You (from Stand Your Ground, 2002) – As opposed to “Mad About You,” where a post-Go-Go’s Belinda Carlisle cavorts about the house in a man’s shirt while singing about her undying love for Paul Reiser. (As I get older, I find my brain compresses the less important memories together to free up storage space.)

poetic justice will come in time

I had another post planned for today, but after spending the better part of this morning swearing at the TV, the local paper, and various internet newsfeeds, I decided to work out my anger here instead.

What’s got me all riled up? The results of the gay marriage vote in the Massachusetts legislature, which means that a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the Commonwealth is one step closer to becoming a reality. The issue will now be voted on in the next legislative session, and should it pass again, it will be decided by ballot question in 2008.

It appalls me that a question of basic human rights and equal protection by law is subject to a referendum by lumpenproletariat, most of whose members I wouldn’t trust to know how to wipe their own asses. Rights are rights. They are not “earned,” they are not “given,” they should not be subject to the whims of popular opinion…unless we open up the whole shebang to that process. If the government is going to get into the business of legislating relationships between two consenting adults, then I want to be able to weigh in on every pending union, gay or straight. “Sorry. You have a beak nose, and she has beady eyes. Your children will be hideous-looking. Petition denied. And you two? He’s a bore and you drink too much. Denied. Next!”

As committed as I am to the idea of participatory governance, the initiative process of legislating via referendum has been corrupted by the basest, ugliest sort of populism. Originally intended as a way to bypass the graft-ridden political machines and their self-serving patrons of ages past, it has long since become a tool of the same special interest groups it was designed to thwart. The public interest takes a back seat to demagoguery and hidden ulterior motives, and even on the rare occasions when a nobly intended progressive measure passes, it ends its life as an ignored, unfunded mandate or gets reshaped as a post-dated Trojan Horse on behalf of some moneyed concern, at the expense of those it was posited to supposedly benefit.

So a coalition of out-of-state groups working alongside their Bay State counterparts wants to use the initiative process to strip a group of their rights, and for what? To “preserve the sanctity of marriage”? Because heterosexual marriages are special and wonderful and doesn’t crash and burn more than half of the time? What kind of insecure idiot bases the worth of his or her marriage on those of others? I’m a straight, white male who married his partner of thirteen years in 2004. The only parties that matter in our marriage are my wife and I, and rightly so. If the rest of the world doesn’t like it, they can fuck off. There is no just reason why that “club of two” status shouldn’t be enjoyed by same-sex couples.

It’s not about the “sanctity of marriage,” it’s about sanctioning bigotry by enshrining it in the state constitution, and there is no religious sleight of hand that can hide that ugly truth. If people were really serious about “saving marriage,” then maybe they need to start looking into legislation to criminalize divorce, or to rescind tax benefits for anyone who remarries...

…or we as a society could put these useless distractions behind us and get on with living our lives without feeling the need to persecute others. Seriously, this culture war bullshit has gotten tiresome.

In lieu of footnotes, please accept this little sampler of relevant tracks which span several decades and multiple genres. Diversity matters.

Neal Ford and the Fanatics – Shame On You (from Garage Beat ’66, Vol. 1: Like What, Me Worry?! 2004) – This one’s dedicated to all the state reps who voted in favor of the gay marriage ban, including that one asshole from the next town over who was the only rep from this area who cast a “yes” vote.

L7 – The Masses Are Asses (from The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, 1997) – Indeed they are, ladies. Indeed they are.

Dead Kennedys – Religious Vomit (from In God We Trust, Inc. 1981) – It's a mix of cheap red wine, stale crackers, bile, and half-digested lumps of hypocrisy.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Ain’t Nobody’s Business (from Feast of the Mau Mau, 1988) - Damn right. It ain’t.

The Caravans – Know Your Rights (from This Is Rockabilly Clash, 2003) – It started off as just three, but the list keeps getting longer and longer as time passes.

c-c-c-cucumber, c-c-c-cabbage

I was struggling to find a suitable topic for today when the Boston Globe’s webpage dropped this gem into my lap. I don’t really get the point of these “worst song” lists as they’re executed at the above link and in places like Blender. Apart from the same targets being hit over and over again (I hear airline food is horrible, by the way) by the various listmakers, there is something else at work that irritates the fuck out of me.

My maternal grandfather served with the occupation forces in post-war Germany, and my grandmother went with overseas with him to live in what was left of Frankfurt. Every German male my grandmother came across -- the postman, the butcher, and so forth – admitted that they served in Hitler’s armed forces but never fired a shot at the Americans. Honestly. One wonders where all those white crosses in Normandy came from.

I get that same sense of guilty personal revisionism from the folks who put together the “worst song” lists. “I was listening to My Aim Is True in 1985! I never lip-synched along to the video of ‘We Built This City’!” Most of the songs listed were huge hits. Someone must have been buying the records. Just not them, unless they were being ironic. Irony: the guilty conscience spackle for the po-mo generation.

Even worse than the folks who insist on hiding pop skeletons in their closets are the 20/20 hindsight hipper-than-thou crowd who have permanent residencies on VH-1’s unending torrent of nostalgia and list shows. Exhibiting toxic levels of smugness, they pass marginally witty judgments on the follies of previous decades. It takes a very ballsy man to mock eighties fashions while wearing a faux-retro, artificially distressed t-shirt with an Alpo dog food label on the front. You said it, one guy who was on two episodes of the final season of Caroline in the City, big shoulder pads are indeed “whack,” but you’d better hurry if you don’t want to miss the DVD release party for Snakes on a Plane.

I’m not trying to pull a Klosterman here and posit a passionate defense of crap. I’m perfectly fine with seeing K-Fed get a critical beatdown, and I’ve argued many times that “My Humps” is the actual manifestation of the first trumpet blast from Revelation:

"The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." - Revelation 8:7

There ought to be more to a “worst songs” than simply dragging out a bunch of vapid pop ditties (preferably recorded by overreaching celebrities) and that one Journey song. Personally, I have a hard time picking either “best” or “worst” songs. My moral objectivism doesn’t extend to my entirely relativistic personal tastes. I acknowledge only two categories: stuff I can listen to and stuff I can’t. There are some songs and bands I enjoy more than others, but the pool is in a constant state of flux, with The Clash being the only constant (and even they have stuff I don’t care for much). My wife, though, is far more sanguine in her musical tastes, and has helped me pick out some painful tracks for today. It’s a little game we call “sacred cow-tipping.”

Shampoo – Trouble (from We Are Shampoo, 1994) – The twisted underbelly of Britpop. I put this track on a recent driving mix CD. Here’s a timeline of my wife’s responses:
Week 1: Bemused “Huh.”
Week 2: “Ugh, I’m going to have this stuck in my head! Their accents are horrible!”
Week 3: Having memorized the CD playlist, she hits the skip button before the song can begin.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Crown of Thorns (from Ocean Rain, 1984) – This one’s a real tragedy, marring an otherwise perfect album. Imagine enjoying the most wonderful hamburger on earth, then getting an undetected human hair tangled on your tongue three bites in – that’s what it feels like when you’re listening to Ocean Rain and this track starts playing. There is a time and a place for vegetable-themed stuttering – no, wait, there isn’t.

Joy Division – Atmosphere (from a 1980 single, collected on Substance, 1988) – I like Joy Division a lot, but I won’t even try and defend Ian Curtis’s vocal stylings. For the most part, his angst-ridden croaking meshed well with the band’s cold, minimalist sound. On this posthumous single, though, his limited abilities fail to the match what the material – a haunting and beautiful synth ballad – requires, and the results are pretty painful to listen to. It’s like attending a drunken karaoke night in some Manchester punk dive. Sacrilegious as it may be to say this, but imagine if The Damned’s Dave Vanian, who has a similar vocal range but better set of pipes, had handled the singing chores.

The Smiths – Girlfriend in a Coma (from The Singles, 1995) – Between this track and the last one, I guarantee I’m going to make some folks’ shit lists. Here’s a question for you: What’s the difference between one teenager sulking to this track and another getting all maudlin over Journey’s “Separate Ways”? Answer: Their parents’ annual incomes.

Some Morrissey-loving friends of mine insist that the whole miserableness thing is a big shtick, a sign of some deep sense of humor that Moz supposedly possesses. But if a joke lands in a forest of creative writing majors, and it’s taken dead seriously, is it still amusing? Not from where my Winnebago is parked, chum.

The Cure – Close to Me (from Staring at the Sea: The Singles, 1986) – As far as my wife is concerned, the Cure’s career ended with The Top, a drug-fueled foray into quasi-psychedelia that pretty much laid the band’s melodic post-punk roots to rest. It was at that point that Robert Smith the musician became Robert Smith the caricature. His hair (and waistline) got bigger, his makeup got thicker, and his melancholy warble became insufferably exaggerated and precious.

“Close to You,” with it’s lazy keyboard noodling and proto-emo lyrics, was the first step on a road that would lead to places I’d rather avoid entirely. It also doesn’t help that I can’t hear the song without confusing it with George Michael’s 1987 hit “Faith.” The two songs are only a half-step removed from each other musically, if you think about it.

I’ve been waiting hours for this/If I could touch your body/I’ve made myself so sick/I know not everybody/I wish I stayed/has a body like you…

So hop to it, mashup maestros, and while you’re at it, could you put together one combining Smashmouth’s “All Star” and the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”? I know someone just dying to hear it.

looking for the writing on the wall

"I vowed that I'm never going to forget the lessons of that day," G.W. Bush said at a 9/11 memorial event on Sunday, and he meant it. The lessons in question being that a weak joke of a president can exploit a national tragedy to reposition himself as a strong leader and be granted a free hand to pursue whatever insane schemes he desires to, as long as they’re parsed in terms of national security and delivered with the basest sort of fear mongering. Bush and his cabal have taken those lessons to heart, using the events of 9/11 to launch a global ideological crusade whose hubristic arrogance would make the most strident Trotskyite blanch.

I knew it would turn out this way the moment my wife told me about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. (I commuting to work on the MBTA when it happened, totally unaware of what was occurring.) Talking on the phone to my father that afternoon, I told him I thought we’d just witnessed the next Reichstag fire. He got angry with me, accusing me of not thinking of those killed. He was wrong. My thoughts at that moment were with the thousands of who died, but also with the billions who would have to live afterwards in a world where a cabal of militaristic, intellectual lightweights was in control of the world’s “only superpower”, and preparing to take full advantage of the American people’s rage and horror for their own ends.

They wasted no time in gutting our constitutional protections, pushing through legislation for a pliable congress to rubber stamp, most of which had less bearing on counterterrorism than affirming the unitary power of the executive branch. Dissenters found themselves drowned out by accusations of being “soft” on terrorists, of aiding the enemy, of treason. These charges were echoed by members of the right-wing punditocracy, who make their living pandering to the ugliest aspects of the populist impulse.

And the ringleaders of the criminal gang responsible for the events of that horrible Tuesday five years back? Still at large, lost in the shuffle while America pisses away its resources in a vain attempt to bring “democracy and freedom” to a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, and has only become the front line of the “War on Terror” because of Bush’s reckless efforts at regime change.