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.)

won't be worried long

One of my strongest childhood memories is of my mother relating a bit of family folklore to me. It concerned some great-great-relation of her father's side of the family, a stoically creepy bunch of Old Yankees from Maine's Androscoggin County. This particular relative worked in a lumber mill, and during the course of his duties got his arm stuck in the machinery. As his friends tried in vain to find the best way to extricate the ruined limb from the works, my laterally-thinking ancestor came up with an easy solution -- power up the machinery and let it take the limb off quickly and cleanly. So they did.

I can't help but think that lingering effects of my mother's story somehow figure into the following random, but characteristically "Andrew," autobiographical antidote.

I adopted Mia not too long after Zoe Blackfeet, my previous feline companion, wandered off and never returned. Mia had belonged to some neurotic yuppies from Winchester who had soured on the idea of pet ownership and dumped her off at the vet's office.

Unlike Zoe (or Budwina before her), Mia was not a personable cat. I don't know if it was from poor socialization or abuse experienced at the hands of her previous owners, or a simple matter of temperament. I've lived around cats my entire life; they're capricious creatures. Mia, though, wasn't so much aloof as sociopathic, and able to switch from snugglebunny to psycho-slasher with no warning whatsoever. (She also possessed the ability to shed her weight in long white fur on a daily basis.)

Even if she wasn't the nicest cat, I was still happy to have her around and living in a decent home.

On a lovely spring afternoon in 2002, I was in my bedroom reading a book when Mia hopped on the bed and stretched out beside me. I patted her. She purred. I scratched behind her ears. She viciously bit and scratched my left forearm, and refused to let go until my limb had been thoroughly flensed.

It hurt like hell, but cat scratches usually do, and this didn't appear that much worse than some of the previous feline-related injuries I had dealt with. I washed the arm with some soap and water and let nature do the rest. That the cuts seemed to be a long time in healing or there was a growing burning sensation in the arm didn't worry me a whole lot. Nor did the fact that over the course of the following week or so my forearm swelled up to near-Popeye proportions.

Maura, of course, was concerned, but it's her job to be. Besides, who is more familiar with my internal workings than I am? It wasn't until I had entered the second week following the incident that I was forced to acknowledge that something wasn't right. (Maura's mom was particularly persuasive with her worried stare and repeated use of "Jaysis.") While my co-workers and family (not Maura, because she understands me) chimed in with a loud chorus of "EMERGENCY ROOM," I decided to take matters into my own (swollen and healthy) hands.

Using a sterilized needle, I opened up the bite wounds that were the source of the infection and let the stream of pus drain out. Afterwards I soaked the arm in warm water and Epsom salt for an hour before slathering the area with anti-bacterial ointment and bandaging it up. It took about a week of such therapy before my arm started to resemble its old self (though I still have a few scars), thus proving that not only that am I too laid back for my own good, but that I can occasionally remedy the problems which arise from my complacency (in an extremely painful and disgusting way that could have been avoided with a glimmer of foresight).

Prince Buster - Pussy Cat Bite Me (from Wreck A Pum Pum, 1976) - Felis dentata ska.

Tom Jones - It Takes a Worried Man (from Along Came Jones, 1965; collected on Millennium Edition, 2000) - Devo's cover of this folk standard will always be the definitive version as far as I'm concerned, but Sir Tom's powerhouse vocals and that magnificent horn section are almost enough to make me reconsider my position.

Love and Rockets - No Big Deal (from Love and Rockets, 1989) - True, but a perfectly fine song, nonetheless.

Albums That Meant Something - Part 5 - Dreams of Last Year's Heroes

This poster, hung over the foot of my bed, is what I woke up to every morning for the better part of a decade. It's the backside of the poster-sized cover to The Feeding of the 5000, Crass's 1978 debut.

As I've mentioned in previous installments of this series, I came into punk rock at a time when the scene was at a low ebb, reduced to isolated individuals and small knots of like-minded enthusiasts. Historical documentation and available material was thin on the ground.

Occasionally one might come across some second-hand books or music mags or a rare affordable treasure in the used vinyl bins, but for the most part it was a trial-and-error journey through uncharted territory when it came to discovering stuff outside the Clash/Pistols/Ramones/Dead Kennedys back-catalogues...or the hardcore scene, which had had taken a bad turn towards the metallic. Hard-won and incomplete information about bands or styles or whatnot was passed by word of mouth or the occasional expensive leap of import-record buying faith.

In the spring of 1992, I was a twenty year old enthusiast of 80's Britpunk and Oi with a studded leather jacket and a crest of purple hair done up Misfits style. It was stock template punrockerdom -- aggro posturing, meticulous accessorizing, and provocative (if a tad tired) fashionizing -- and I say that without making excuses for or condemning my younger self. It's all part of being young, but even then I was feeling a bit long in the tooth for the game and with little idea where it was all going to lead.

Then I discovered Crass.

I'm not certain what it was that convinced me to give the seminal anarchopunks a listen. Patches, badges and jacket paintings featuring the band's distinctive symbols and slogans were commonly enough spotted around the scene, though the same applied to Discharge, and I never warmed to their stuff. It was more likely my insatiable hunger for material to listen to, combined with my reading some reviews for Crass gigs (written in painfully earnest anarcho-communist jargon) in some old fanzines I found. In any case, I ended up picking up a copy of Best Before 1984, a 1986 retrospective of the band's career, at In Your Ear on Commonwealth Avenue sometime in the late spring of 1992.

It was the most terrifying thing I had ever listened to.

It was twenty tracks -- taken from the band's singles and topped off with a live cut from their final performance -- of hardcore anarchist politics delivered over crude tribal punk riffs and occasionally garnished with experimental sonic effects. Protest music (or political music in general) is an iffy proposition, as the proper mix of art and ideology is difficult to achieve.

Crass never aimed for a proper balance, and let the musical aesthetics take a back seat to the message. Yet on the best of their efforts, the sheer force of their convictions elevates the material past the level of noisy agitprop. Whether on "Reality Asylum," a scathing spoken word attack on religion, or the more traditionally punky "Big A Little A," about non-violent resistance, the sense of outrage is visceral, palpable, and chilling in a way no cartoony shock value nonsense could ever hope to match.

More so than the music, it was the concepts behind the Crass collective that struck a chord with me during that transitional period. The theories, manifestos and explanations -- packed in as booklets with Best Before and Christ: The Album -- concerning the punk movement, anarchism, pacifism, and activism influenced me greatly even if I didn't entirely agree with their views on politics and human nature. (I'd love to think a society could work on the basis of voluntary cooperation alone, but harsh experience has taught me otherwise, and no amount of utopian cheerleading is going to change that.)

It got me to thinking about what my priorities were as a self-identified punk rocker, which I realized meant more than an elaborate hairstyle and dogmatic adherence to genre orthodoxy...which was great, because I've saved a ton of cash since I've quit buying ultra-super-hold hair gel and Cockney Rejects bootleg live albums.

Here are two of my favorite selections from Best Before 1984. The first, originally from a 1980 split single with the Poison Girls, is a pointed rejection of letting the ends justify the means. The second, taken from a 1982 EP, is a sandblast of vituperative anti-militarism which brought down the impotent wrath of Parliament. (An edited news clip about the controversy precedes the track.)

Crass - Bloody Revolutions

Crass - Sheep Farming in the Falklands

lost all track of time

A couple of Fridays back, the wife and I had to make a trip to scenic North Reading on feral cat business. As we were already in Burlington on another errand, I decided to bypass the forbidden zone that is the I-93/I-95 interchange and take the back way, which involved heading down Cambridge Road (not "Street") towards the Billerica line then turning onto Route 62's serpentine path to glory.

It had been a while since I'd been down that way, and I was astonished to find that so little had changed in the past twenty years. The development boom of the past decade or so has completely transformed huge swathes of greater Boston's landscape. Communities that were considered positively honky-tonk when I was a kid, places like Billerica, Wilmington, and Tewksbury, have since become upmarket suburbs, and there is no open space so rocky, swampy, or otherwise tagged with liabilities that some ambitious developer won't clear-cut and terraform it into McMansion-friendly subdivisions. The local "boonies," as much I knew them from childhood, have all but evaporated into a single homogeneous sprawl radiating out from Boston to the edges of I-495 loop.

But not along Route 62, apparently, where old houses are encircled by forests of old trees, and even the post-WW2 ranch homes have gradually assimilated into the backdrop of the green. The corridor hasn't been entirely immune to the sprawl's encroachment, but compared to my old neighborhood in North Woburn, it has remained largely intact...a place where you still need to use your high-beams to navigate in the dark hours.

TWO WARPS TO URANUS!
(Granted, that also applies to the very developed and upscale town of Winchester, but that's because those rich motherfuckers are too cheap to turn up the brightness on their streetlamps. They're also too cheap to pay for trash pickup, which means you see assholes in Porsches illegally dumping their garbage in the Middlesex Fells Reservation.)

We passed by truck and equipment yards with unpaved surfaces bounded by pine trees, anachronistic retail islands at long-bypassed intersections, a poultry farm, and the requisite series of non-chain, locally-owned eateries with inexplicable names. (We also stumbled across the location of the local Wal-Mart store, suggesting that the honky-tonk aura is not so easily dispelled.) It's an odd thing to wax nostalgic over, but it's comforting nonetheless to know that the topography of my childhood exists in some form or another less than twenty minutes from my house. Until the next frenzied round of development begins, that is.

The sharpest jab of nostalgia hit me while were crossing over the Boston-Lowell train tracks by the intersection of Routes 62 and 38 in Wilmington. There, to the left of the road and beside the tracks was this place of many childhood pilgrimages...

Our Mecca, Lourdes, and Graceland rolled into a single seedy piece of commercial real estate.
I couldn't see what occupies the space now, but back in 1984 it was the location of "Trains & Games," the only arcade within reasonable distance of my North Woburn stomping grounds. I don't know which one of the neighborhood crew discovered the place, but once we knew about it, we hopped onto our off-brand BMX bikes and made the long trip to Wilmington whenever time, weather, and availability of quarters permitted.

The selection of games at the place was an adequate enough mix of perennial favorites (Pac-Man, Robotron: 2084, Dig Dug) and a handful of newer titles like Gyruss, Punch Out, and Mr. Do's Wild Ride. The arcade attached to the go-kart further up Route 38 in Tewksbury had a bigger and better selection, but it also involved biking an additional four miles each way. What Trains & Games lacked in diversity, it more than made up for in convenience. Plus the lone staffer behind the booth was far more laid back than the uptight eagle-eyed crew at the Speedway who'd show you to the door the moment your last token was spent.

Mr. Do's Franchise Fatigue!
Weekday afternoons were the ideal time to make the run, as the place tended to be packed on the weekends. The fact that most of the gang had strict dinnertime curfews made it tricky to pull off without split-second timing and frenzied pedaling.

Hit the ground running when the 2:45 final bell at the Linscott-Rumford rang. Throw your book bag in the porch and holler to the parents that you were going out. Meet up with the rest of the crew and zip down the old train tracks to the Wilmington line. Pedal your ass off down Route 38 for a half hour. Burn through a pocket of quarters in twenty minutes. Pedal back to North Woburn while ignoring the stitch in your side. Collapse on the lawn with five minutes to spare.

...and even if you could barely choke down your mac 'n' cheese through the dry heaves and heat exhaustion, those brief minutes of pixelized joy were totally worth it.

"You know what this game needs? A boss with a rape conviction and a penchant for ear biting!"
In the autumn of 1984, my family moved out of North Woburn to the center of the city. The additional four miles of biking required and the discovery that the local pool hall and bowling alley had game rooms (and were in walking distance) put a stop to my trips to Trains & Games, though I occasionally tagged along with a friend whose mom used to drop him off there. The last time I visited the place, sometime during my sophomore year in college, the arcade had gone under and had been replaced by one of the many lousy comic book stores that attempted to make hay during the 1990's speculation boom. It, too, went tits up a short while later.

Seeing the place after all these years brought back a flood of vivid memories -- nothing especially dramatic or important, just very distinct impressions of a time long past. I can see the shortcut to East Dexter Avenue in bright light of a spring afternoon. I can smell the muddy tang of the shallow stream that ran alongside the path. I can hear Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherrie" and Phil Collins's "Against All Odds" -- and I wish to Christ it would just stop.

I place a lion's share of the blame on Hot Hit Videos, an attempt by the local CBS affiliate to cash in on the music video craze of the time. The show's 4:30 PM time slot made it ideal cooldown time viewing after getting back from the arcade, but the programmers' fondness for AOR cheese has left me scarred for life.

If I have to remember the spring of 1984 through pop music, at least let it be pop music I actually enjoyed at the time...like these two tracks...

The Go-Go's - Head Over Heels (from Talk Show, 1984) - Goodbye, bubbly new wave....

Ratt - Round and Round (from Out of the Cellar, 1984) - ...and hello, ugly pop metal.

can't you settle for the center of attention

In his collection of Unpopular Essays, the philosopher Bertrand Russell discussed the phenomenon he called "the superior virtue of the oppressed," by which the marginalization of certain groups is justified by the attribution of certain intrinsic moral characteristics to those being oppressed. The inherent "compassion" of women, for instance, which allegedly made them ill-suited for pursuits where a degree of ruthlessness is needed, or the enduring patronization of the "noble savage" myth.

What happens, though, when those "virtues" and the concept of "oppression" are self-applied, rather dubiously, via conscious decision?

While I think that writer Chris Claremont's run of X-Men stories are, at least until 1986 or so, pretty entertaining reads, the concept behind the team -- mutant outcasts fighting for a world that hates them -- never really appealed to me. Despite the tendency in some circles to elevate the stories into some grand parable about civil rights, I suspect that the real meat and bones behind the franchise's evergreen appeal is that it speaks so clearly to the anxieties of the adolescent nerd, with protagonists who operate on the fringes of an unsympathetic society and marked for great things though genetic happenstance.

What specifically put me off of the X-Men is the characters sense of insularity. For all the lofty talk of tolerance and equality, the team seemed to revel in their outsider status: "We're X-Men. You're human, you wouldn't understand." Unlike, say, the Avengers, whose membership was open to androids, mutants, rednecks, and even Wonder Man, the X-Men were an echo chamber of melodrama less concerned with asserting their place in society than in endless navel-gazing about their special status....a status predicated on genetic superiority and exclusiveness.

In my travels through the harsh badlands of nerdity, I saw a lot of "outcast as elitist" mentality amongst my peers. It wasn't enough to find a community of like-minded souls or simply accept that one's tastes were skewed differently from the masses' baseline, there had to be a cosmic reason for it, rooted in a "us versus them" mentality. There are many valid reasons why some marginalized and persecuted groups and individuals might turn a bit insular. Growing up closeted in a ultra-homophobic environment, for example, would understandably lead to a certain sense of guardedness. The head cheerleader making fun of your Boba Fett t-shirt? Not so much. It would be one thing if it manifested as a egalitarian pan-geek celebration, but in practice the insularity has taken the form of a hierarchy of fan-tustans, judged from inside the barricades of each individual microcosm; videogame geeks look down on comic book geeks who look down on roleplayers who look down on videogamers.

When you factor in the pervasiveness of power fantasies within the scene's holy scriptures, it's shouldn't come as a surprise -- though it does for many people -- that there's a disturbing undercurrent of crypto-fascism amongst (mostly male) nerds that manifests itself in many troubling ways:

- The unironic appreciation of the anti-hero/bad ass/monster in heroic clothing. ("...and then he tortured the bad guy by slicing the dude's balls off! That's how the cops should do things in real life!")

- Celebration of violent masculinity (usually coupled with mockery of feminism or homosexuality). ("It makes no scientific sense for a female character in a fantasy game where orcs and dragons exist to have the same maximum strength score as a male!")

- An infatuation with a mythologized reactionary past, with apologias regarding totalitarian or militarist regimes and leaders. ("Hitler's mistake is that he should have dropped his hatred of the Jews and concentrated on the Soviets...")

All the above behaviors (and more) were witnessed during my stint as president of the campus sci-fi club. I took the job specifically to keep it out of the hands of those who wanted those quite pathetic vestments of authority too much, and my approach to leadership was hands-off in the extreme. Even still, I had a hard time shaking off the efforts of the rank and file who wanted to build a cult of personality around me. (Yeah, I know. It shocked the hell out of me, too. I had to sneak out of the club room when I went record shopping, lest an uninvited retinue follow me to Central Square.)

Things went south after I started dating Maura and neglected the vicarious needs of my flock, who then gravitated to a master of braggadocio (GTA IV players: Imagine a real-life Brucie). Within a matter of weeks they were reciting his bullshit sex-and-violence stories with awestruck reverence, declaring war upon his "enemies," and mimicking his leather-jacket-and-combat-boots mode of dress. I quit showing up after that, but I'm certain the party armbands were printed up not long afterwards.

Nick Lowe - Little Hitler (from Jesus of Cool, 1978) - Um, actually, this pop rock gem falls outside the established Third Reich canon. You'd know that if you read my Naziwiki page.

(The above ruminations were unabashedly inspired by the talented Dave Lartigue's far superior post featured here.)

nothing I would change

During the Spring 1993 semester, I composed a series of "morning poems" which took the form of doggerel glosses scribbled in the margins of my class notes. Only fourteen of the original set of nineteen poems have survived the passing of time; the other five have been lost to various purges, though it is possible that a revised complete set still dwells in the documents folder of my wife's old Packard Bell 386. (Not that I'm in a hurry to find out, as I think the incompleteness adds a certain air of mystery, a la lost silent films and classical texts.)

Of all the things I've written, the morning poems are the things I am proudest of, or rather "least embarrassed by" -- not because they're even remotely good, but because they lack the usual self-consciousness that marks my other written work.

Here's the first entry in the sequence:

Morning Poem #1

Again, my friend?
What could you possibly be thinking
In bringing such a crime against pastry
To the desk next to mine?

A danish, you say?
Nay, it is a coiled turd of dough
Scraped off the sidewalk
And glazed in sugar.

I was present
When the carcass pits were peeled open
And the skies over North Woburn turned ochre
With death's heady perfume.

That charnel house tang
Is balsam and lavender
To the smell of your so-called "danish."
Does your nose not function?

You laugh loudly
In response to a joke by your overpainted doll.
A constellation of soggy crumbs
Sprays from your lips.

My head is hurting.
Your gut must be hurting.
Do us both a favor next time.
Buy a donut instead.

I can't remember the context behind most of scribblings (though I know that the "FROM WHAT I HEARD SHE SHOWED UP LATE AND WAS SHITFACED" scrawled on one of my notebook pages refers to an ex-girlfriend), but still vividly recall my inspiration for the above poem.

It's about a fellow that used to sit next to me in my Intro to Symbolic Logic class. He looked like Huey Lewis with a shag haircut, and was fond of chewing foul-smelling danishes with his mouth open and whispering loudly to his girlfriend, who looked like she fell off the back of some meth dealer's Harley. I have no idea why I chose to vent my spleen though bad verse, but it started a trend of poesy that lasted right up until the end of finals.

Johnny Tillotson - Poetry in Motion (from All His Early Hits - And More, 1990) - "I was hoping for Elizabeth Bishop, but what I got was Sylvia Plath..."

Albums That Meant Something - Part 4 - Dying to Be Written

(from Skeleton Key, Volume 3: Telling Tales, by Andi Watson)
While I never self-identified as a goth back in the embarrassing old days, I did listen to and purchase quite a bit of "goth" music. By the time my twenty-first birthday rolled around, I had already started to evolve past my punk rock persona phase, as the stock set of subcultural trappings felt less like sincere act of rebellion and more like a cul-de-sac of clichés. Musically, too, my tastes had begun to shift from the aggro to the atmospheric -- postpunk, synthpop & wave, anarchopunk stuff mostly.

It was a period when I revisited a lot of previously acquired material that had been filed at the back of my collection when it failed to pass my punk puritan criteria -- a sequence of small epiphanies which collectively added up to a paradigm shift in my listening habits. Even albums I'd liked well enough before, such as Unknown Pleasures and Entertainment, fairly well blindsided me with sublime charm that until then I'd been oblivious to.

So it was with UK Decay. My love of "For My Country," the Luton band's epic and artsy contribution to the Punk and Disorderly compilation, led me to pick up a copy of the "Unexpected Guest" single, whose spookshow subject matter, operatic vocals, and dub-influenced basslines was utterly lost on my ignorant Cock Sparrer-listening self. I passed the single onto a friend, only to ask for it back a couple years later after I'd smartened up...and this time around it sounded like the greatest thing I'd ever heard.

A short while later, Maura and I were flipping through the bins at the Tower Records store in Harvard Square. While the store's prices ran on the high side compared to other shops (which I suspect is the real reason -- not p2p applications -- that the chain eventually went belly up), it did have an section dedicated to indie and import releases. The usual ritual for the import CD stock involved being marked up to extortionate prices for a few months before inevitably being dumped unsold in a discount bin at the end of the aisle...which is where I found the subject of today's post.

It's the original 1992 release of the companion compilation disc to Mick Mercer's Gothic Rock encyclopedia. It was purchased for a fiver on the basis of having an otherwise unobtainable (for me, at least) UK Decay track culled from the band's amazing Rising From the Dread EP, but it also introduced me to (or washed away the taint of negative personal associations from) a half-dozen or so other acts that would loom large in my listening and purchasing habits into the present day; bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, and Danse Society that, unlike the guitar rock sound that the gothic rock genre eventually coalesced into, took their cues from punk/postpunk and and ran in a host of strange, dark and quite often playful directions.

Much like Mercer's book (purchased after it got an American release), the Gothic Rock compilation does an excellent job at fostering an appreciation for the scene, music, and participants that doesn't attempt to gloss over the silly and/or pretentious aspects therein. The compilation was eventually given an American release, padded with extra tracks and eventually expanded into a multi-volume set, but I've never felt the need to upgrade from the original. That's partially due to sentimental reasons, but also because I've gotten past the place where I need such roadmaps.

UK Decay - Testament - By all rights, it should topple over the precipice into pretentious self-parody, yet it somehow manages to retain a precarious balance that gives gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it.

Sex Gang Children - Dieche - Fuck you, AFI, and the My Chemical Romance you rode in on, too.

and wider and brighter

I'm going to take a break from the class war today in order to pay tribute to Armagideon Time HQ's resident feline matriarchs...

...Little Baby Setzer (the gray and white tabby) and Nubby (the tuxedo cat). They started visiting our house in the summer of 2005 as part of a quartet of feral kitten sisters. When we brought the entire group to our vet to be fixed that following spring, we were informed that both Nubby and Setz had already been knocked up and that they were too far along to safely abort.

(Maura and I have since been told that was bullshit by someone from the local feral cat spay and neuter group, but what's done is done.)

We took the pregnant pair of felines into our home, and they gave birth -- two days apart from each other at the end of April 2006 -- to two litters of four kittens each. While she carried out her maternal responsibilities to the letter, Nubby wasn't enthusiastic about motherhood and let the more dedicated Setz pick up most of the slack.

Unlike their non-pregnant sisters (Money and Princess) who couldn't wait to get back outside after the post-spay observation period, Nubby and Setz embraced the housecat life style and never looked back. We ended up keeping four of their kittens (Jem, CooCoo, and Carmen from Nubby's brood and Witch Baby from Setz's), the other four (Tyra, Beezo, Ultima Morpho, and Gizmo) were placed in good homes.

The Cure - The Lovecats (from a 1983 single; collected on Staring at the Sea, 1986) - Staring at the Sea being one track and the Atlantic Ocean removed from Standing on a Beach which I own in LP format. It was the first Cure album I bought (at In Your Ear's Harvard Square location, along with a copy of PIL's Album, in the January of 1992), and I picked it up because I thought the girl I was dating (a very strange woman named Maura) was a big fan of the band.

Even though confused my past and present tenses -- she had been a big fan, but became disgusted with them after The Top -- the purchase was a mini-watershed moment that shook me loose of punk purist attitudes concerning music.

it was ready to freeze

Some memories loom larger than others:

1. During my senior year of high school, I hung around with some punk rock kids from an upscale suburb a few towns over from Woburn, mostly because of a crush I had on girl who was part of the scene. (My romantic aspirations would eventually be sunk due to my adolescent obnoxiousness, but that's neither here no there.) This was smack dab in the middle of the recession caused by the 1987 stock market tumble, and one of my conversations with the object of my desire turned to the present state of economic affairs.

"This has affected my family so hard," she told me. "My parents have to decide whether to sell our ski lodge in North Conway or our vacation cottage on Winnipesaukee." (At the time, I was living with my widowed grandmother and collecting my mother's Social Security survivors' benefits, while trying to figure out how the budget cuts were going to affect my Mass Health coverage.)

2. Right after the 1992 L.A. riots broke out, I was walking through McCormick Hall at UMass Boston when I overheard a group of three, very white and immaculately groomed students wearing all manner of political buttons exult "The revolution has started, brothers!"

3. During one of my rare appearances at a family gathering, I discover that a cousin of mine, a nice kid with a privileged upbringing and degree from an elite school, was hoping to get a job at the national headquarters of the union I happened to belong to, despite her never having worked in the environments the union operated within.

4. The death knell of grad school days came when I got into a tense debate with a professor, a white woman who commuted into the city from a tony South Shore community, that her "liberal" theories of social reform failed to take certain social realities into account, realities that could be seen up close in personal if one were to take a walk across Morrissey Boulevard and stroll Dorchester for a couple of hours. Or by simply talking to the people who were the subject of her grandiose theories.

She quickly turned nasty and refused to accept that her abstract methodology (in a friggin' social science, for Christ's sake) was flawed.

5. On my way to a dentist appointment last spring, I was on the JFK/UMass shuttle bus with a group of very white and immaculately groomed students wearing all manner of political buttons who were discussing their summer plans. "My dad's an influential lawyer, so he pulled some strings and set me up with an internship with the Socialist Workers' Party."

I'm all for a big tent. We really are in this thing together in the grand scheme of things, like it or not, and it's foolish to reject a sincere offer of help. Just don't patronize, pander, or presume based on a position of privilege. I freely acknowledge the advantages granted to me, which is why I tend to stick to a broader egalitarian view in my sermons, rather than harping over details that can be hashed out once we've leveled the playing field for all.

I still fucking hate condescending rich folks, though, and those who feel obligated to defend them. The latter, especially.

Fear - I Don't Care About You (from The Record, 1982) - But I fully expect you to follow me without question, and allow your crushed and ruined bodies to be my stepladder towards greatness.

The Dils - I Hate the Rich (from a 1977 single; collected on DIY: We're Desperate - The LA Scene: 1976-79, 1993) - But I still oppose raising the capital gains tax, just in case I do happen to become a (self-loathing) millionaire someday! Thank you, false consciousness, for making me laugh about the falures of capitalism again.

the stars are brighter

A certain degree of flexibility is required to negotiate life's twists and turns. A stone obvious statement, yes, but one whose message isn't heeded nearly as often as it ought to be.

In my younger years, I knew a surprising number of people between the ages of 16 and 21 who were convinced that they had sorted out the rules of the game. I'm not talking about the standard adolescent delusions of grandeur ("I'm going walk into Paramount's offices and show them my alterna-soundtracked off-brand Catcher in the Rye and become an Oscar-winning screenwriter!") or the methodically plotted ambitions of the Type A set ("AP Biology, then an undergrad degree from Tufts, then med school, then a vacation home in Tahoe."). Nor am I talking about those enviable individuals (such as my college buddy Southie Dave or Kevin Church) with a knack for navigating life's various currents so as to best reach their stated objectives, large or small.

The folks I'm referring to are the ones who have codified their (inherently myopic) worldviews right down to most minute details. More often than not, they've given their creed a cute nickname ("Jessie's Theory" or "Jack's Manifesto") and make frequent use of jargonistic terms like "axiomatic" when expounding their philosophies to their peers. And expound they do, evangelizing with a zeal born of absolute certitude and casting a jaundiced eye upon those who aren't convinced by their obvious wisdom.

The details of the platform vary from person to person, but it tends to be a mix of received pop philosophy and pat assumptions made in the safety of a sheltered environment and lacking in real world empiricism. Favorite subjects include relationships and career aspirations, which provide opportunities to stress off-the-rack individualist views in opposition to the unenlightened lumpenmundane herd. Marriage and cubicle life can be problematic? The devil, you say!

Back then, the utter confidence of these people gave me pause, especially in light of my own adolescent lack of clarity, which was roundly criticized...

"Fine. Enroll at UMass Boston [I did], stay at your grandmother's house [again, yes], and live in Woburn for the rest of your life [my current plan] -- I'm going to join an artists' commune in Prague and reject the bourgeoisie lifestyle."

It might have stung at the time, but I eventually ran into this individual at the Burlington Mall a few years later. She was the assistant manager at a shoe store. There were no lofty speeches about French poetry or free love, only a litany of workplace gossip delivered to the tune of the Overpriced Shoe Company's employee handbook. "None of my co-workers appreciate the seriousness of our vocation," she told me, sans irony, at one point of the painful conversation.

I've seen the same scenario repeat itself over and over again in the time since. Last I heard, Little Miss Career and Relationship Advice was single and busing tables at an Olive Garden in Burbank. Our brief reunion via email ended abruptly when she asked if I was still dating Maura and I responded that we were married and had bought a house...in Woburn. The gay aspiring psychic ended up repudiating himself and joining the Catholic priesthood. The Queen of the Soapbox, who had made many public pronouncements against 9-to-5 work and marriage, engaged in all sorts of semantic contortions in order to explain her engagement and taking a white collar office job. A veritable feast of schadenfreude, if I was a more petty-minded soul.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. The problem with rigid systems, political or personal, is that they assume that vagaries of life can be definitively quantified when even the slightest empirical experience shows that chaos is an endemic aspect of day-to-day living. Water pumps fail, cavities rot through to the nerve, pink slips are handed out -- shit happens, in other words, and half-assed philosophies forged in the callowness of youth are a poor substitute for being able to think on one's feet and come to grips with the inevitable crises life is going to blindside you with.

This line of reasoning often gets lumped in with the "you'll understand when you're older" argument, but there are clear differences. It's not about defensive post-facto excuses or justifications (or begrudging the younger generation its idealism). It is possible to maintain one's core principles over a span of years, but creating, then attempting to adhere to a comprehensive worldview based on shallow assumptions with no basis in reality simply establishes the groundwork for an inevitable crisis of faith, in which hotswapping one self-serving ideology for another becomes a tempting solution.

The Auteurs - How Could I Be Wrong (from New Wave, 1993) - What you could have been listening to back in '93, but were too busy trying fool yourself into thinking that Stone Temple Pilots were a decent band. Do you feel ashamed now? You ought to.

a fool might start a fight

My choice of footwear during my junior high school days:

Oh, how I loved my camouflage Chuck Taylors, Reagan Era militarism made manifest as funky footwear. I owned two pairs, both of which I wore until the canvas uppers rotted and came away from the rubber soles.

Though Chuck Taylors have since become a iconic fashion accessory for the hipster set, back in the mid-1980's they were simply another excuse for social ostracism for the lads and lasses attending the Kennedy Jr. High School. The sneaker wars were just beginning to heat up in those days, and the ever-changing hierarchy of brands acted as a quick-and-easy shorthand by which to separate the elect from the damned...and there was no quicker road to the Abyss than being caught wearing a pair camo high-tops.

Plus they had rubber toes, and rubber toes are for "fags" dont'cha know?

On the apex of the social pyramid, "My Adidas" ruled in the study hall as is in Heaven. I freely confess my lack of enthusiasm for rap and hip hop is rooted in class and race issues. I despised the rich white motherfuckers who were the biggest fans of those genres in my middle school days. It's hard to develop an appreciation for the "sounds of the street" when the son of the bank manager (sporting a designer tracksuit and gold chains) is the genre's resident musical ambassador.

Looking back, my decision to wear, and more importantly stick with, my woodland camo Chucks despite the taunts was an early step on my path to punk rock, in the sense that I started to grasp the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" rules of the game and simply walked away from the table. It's better to be an honest goat than a Sisyphean wannabe sheep.

Converse discontinued making the camouflage version of the shoe by the time my second pair finally gave up the ghost, and I had to settle for the basic black model until my freshman year, when I was given my first pair of combat boots by my father, and I haven't looked back since.

I don't regret the decision, though it did mean missing out on these stylin' fad-licensed kicks...

...ideal for Bat-dancing the night away (though they lack the proper arch support necessary for doing the Batusi without severe risk of injury).

Teen Idles - Sneakers (from the Minor Disturbance EP, 1980) - Not to be confused with the Idle Race, though I occasionally fantasize about Jeff Lynne and Ian MacKaye collaborating on a emo hardcore/symphonic prog concept album. Then I remember this and the resulting screams of terror can be heard as far away as the Pioneer Valley.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Camouflage (from BGM, 1981) - Oddball synth is the new KBD punk.

The Marks - High Heel Sneakers (from a 1966 single; collected on Rare & Raw Beat from the Sixties, Vol. 1, 1996) - Sure, this R&B standard has been covered by everyone and their collective grandmother, but you haven't lived until you've heard it translated into Dutch freakbeat.

though I love you unclean

From the January-February 1988 issue of Nintendo Power comes this token effort toward music journalism...

(Click to be like Wham! and MAKE IT BIG!)
It's written in the same hyperbolic hard-sell tone employed by the periodical to foist such quality gamepaks such as Ghost Lion and the California Raisins game onto the impressionable youth of late 1980's America, which is quite disconcerting considering the choice of artists featured. Of the three, only Debbie Gibson was an actual chart success at the time (though I still am unable to understand how that came to be). Huey Lewis and the News had already taken the first steps on the road to state fair appearances, and Julian Lennon, living proof that talent (unlike appearance) can't be genetically transmitted, had already basked in his necrotic fifteen minutes of public fascination a few years prior.

I assume the decision on which artists to spotlight came down to least offensive denominator, so as not to scare off the parents who actually paid for the games pimped in the pages of Nintendo Power, hence no South of Heaven or Locust Abortion Technician. I can understand that line of reasoning, but there must have been other acts able to meet Nintendo's vetting process, ones with proven tweener appeal and whose hypetastic "Sound Waves" blurb didn't require committing "...and clearly shows he is following in the footsteps of his talented father (late Beatle John Lennon)" to immortality via the printed page.

Or involve Huey Lewis at all

It's not like I would have noticed, anyhow. The period from roughly 1985 to 1989 was something of a pop interregnum for me, a time when I effectively unplugged myself from the contemporary music grid. My burgeoning appreciation for 60's pop, rock, and especially soul music, combined with the death of V-66, a local music video station and my main means of keeping up with music trends, worked to suspend my interest in anything recorded after 1972.

I apparently didn't miss much, either:

Granted, the pop charts are inherently weighted toward the crap end of the spectrum, and show only the narrowest view into an given era's musical legacy. There was plenty of outstanding stuff released during those years, but even if I wasn't bopping to the backbeat of some mid-60's Stax recording, the chances I'd have discovered gems like XTC's Oranges and Lemons or New Order's Technique or Billy Bragg's Worker's Playtime on my own back then were pretty much nil.

My peers at the time were either budding juvenile delinquents or (worse) Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts. The musical tastes of both groups ran the wide gamut from hard rock to heavy metal, and took every iota of willpower I possessed to resist indoctrination. Seriously, I was this close to thinking that Rush was a brilliant band before I managed to pull myself back from the all-consuming abyss. The handful of kids in Woburn who were hep to what was then called the "college rock" scene didn't run in the same circles as I did, and, truth be told, they also tended to be pricks and not really the type of folks I'd take listening advice from.

It wasn't until I got into punk (by way of thrash metal) that I again started listening to music that wasn't recorded before I was born. The ready availability of cheap used vinyl made it easy to play catch up and discover most of what I missed out on the first time around (and then some) and take chances on things that I'd have otherwise passed up on checking out. I don't regret the hiccup in development of my musical tastes at all. If anything, I appreciate the advantage in approaching commonly known material as a outsider has conferred on several occasions. Nostalgia's lens flare tends to throw off one's ability to focus properly.

For the musical portion of today's program, here are three tracks released in 1988-89 from bands that did not earn a blurb in Nintendo Power, but have earned my (belated) Seal of Approval:

Babes in Toyland - He's My Thing (from Spanking Machine, 1989) - If Siouxsie Sioux fronted the Cramps...

My Bloody Valentine - (When You Wake) You're Still In A Dream (from Isn't Anything, 1988) - Spike-heeled shoegaze.

Orchids - If You Can't Find Love (from Lyceum, 1989) - Live twee or cry.

a tale of a tree

In the woods across the street from my childhood home stood an enormous dead tree. It must have been quite the sight when it was alive, and it still managed to dominate the westward view from my backyard even in death, resembling a giant's skeletal hand reaching up though the sumac and scrub.

The inexorable tag-team of entropy and the elements eventually stripped the hand of its gnarled, twisted fingers, leaving just the amputated spike of the trunk standing on the high bank by a bend in the brook. On a spring afternoon in 1982, having nothing better to do, my friend Artie and I decided that we would bring the rest of the tree crashing down.

It was one of those examples of impromptu self-amusement that comes naturally to children and is envied by adults. Equipped with an arsenal of busted, rusted, or broken tools scavenged from the junkyard or "liberated" from unlocked sheds, we proceeded to chip away at the rotted base of the trunk.

It wasn't an easy task; even adjusting for kid's-eye-view inflation, the trunk had to have been about five to six feet in circumference and around twelve feet in height. The outside layer of wood was thoroughly soft and rotten; it had the texture of damp foam rubber and infested with all manner of grubs and small black beetles (who likely were irritated by the two snot-noses encroaching on their turf). Underneath the mush, however, was a solid hardwood core that shook off all but our most determined efforts. We were in no hurry, though, and toiled away a couple of hours a day over the next few weeks.

Eventually we reached a point where the trunk could be shifted by a series of enthusaistic kicks delivered through Sears' brand boys' workboots. A creak-groan of snapping cellulose, a cry of "TIMBER", and the tree came crashing down, the top of the trunk clearing the brook to flatten the bushes on the opposite bank. (It would have made a nice bridge if the undergrowth on the other side hadn't been impassable. It did provide a nice place to sit and dangle one's feet over the water, providing one didn't mind the occasional beetle bite on one's hindquarters.)

It was wicked cool to witness, but once the giddy high-fives and repeated utterances of "Did you see that?" were done with, we felt a bit lost. We had achieved our goal, but had invested ourselves so intently in making it happen that we never considered what we'd do afterwards.

We didn't try to do something more productive, like pick up litter or start a petition to make the woods into a city park. We just wanted to knock down more trees.

On the way home from our Sunday shopping trips, I occasionally take a detour through the old neighborhood, inflicting my stock set of nostalgic rambles upon my poor wife. The woods across from my old house are gone, gobbled up by suburban sprawl's insatiable appetite for open space and replaced with a subdivision. All traces of Artie's and my childhood handiwork have been excised from the landscape.

There's a message in there, I think.

Metro Stylee - Destroy (from Metro Stylee, 1998) - I posted the Girls Gone Ska version of this track back in September '06. This is the slightly different version which appeared on the N.Y. band's debut (and, as far as I know, only) album and it's a catchy little number dealing with karmic retribution, negationism, and pacifism.

Paul van Dyk feat. St. Etienne - Tell Me Why (The Riddle) (Radio Edit) (from a 2000 single) - Why? Because I said so. And because I think this track is rather nice.

a horse and contract rider approaches

They call me MISTER Ed!
From BitterAndrew's Comprehensive Guide to Films That Don't Exist, But Should:

Equestrophobic southern sherriff Bill Gillespie (Steiger) is forced to team up with Ed (Harvester), a visiting police horse from the big city, in order to solve a mysterious murder in this unusual blending of low comedy and socially aware drama.

Though the film unwisely goes a tail-lifting joke (of five) too far, both leads turn in exceptional performances. Steiger adds an astonishing degree of depth to his character, which a lesser talent might have simply portrayed as a broad redneck caricature. Gillespie's attempts to come to grips with the fact that Ed will only speak in his presence reflect a greater internal transformation where the scales of anti-equine bigotry fall away to reveal genuine feelings of respect and friendship toward his four-legged partner.

As good as Steiger's performance was, Harvester's was even better, being able to convey a wealth of nuanced emotion though such simple gestures as the stomp of a hoof or the flick of a tail. His comedic timing, too, was absolutely flawless (although I'm still perplexed over what appeared to be a length of nylon fishing line dangling from his mouth during the scenes where he speaks).

Harvester would ultimately win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film, but chose to boycott the award ceremony, instead sending playwright Peter Shaffer to deliver a speech about the unfair portrayals of Equine-Americans in the mass media.

Three stars.

Jay Livingston - The Theme from Mr. Ed (from Television's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: From the 50's and 60's, 1990) - There was a time when "domestic fantasy" sitcoms were considered to be the bottom of the televisual barrel, and the most frequently cited example of the mediums will toward banality. This was, of course, before Dance War and Celebrity Rehab hit the small screen and made My Mother, The Car look like high fucking art in comparion. Watching the bitter residue of Jeff Conaway get ointment rubbed on his lower back or watching Jerry Van Dyke get poked in the ass (complete with cartoon sound effect) by a spring directed by a sentient automobile -- I know what I'd choose.

Echo & The Bunnymen - Bring on the Dancing Horses (from the Pretty in Pink OST, 1986) - Albums That Meant Something, Mini-Version: Back in the early months of Maura's and my relationship, we and my ever-present punk rock pal used to head over to Maura's house after classes to hang out in her den and engage in some basic cable channelsurfing -- poking fun at the Club MTV audience, getting a whiff of uncured nostalgia from USA's Cartoon Express, and so forth.

Shortly before the end of the Spring 1992 semester, the three of us sat through a TBS showing of Pretty in Pink, and we had a blast enjoying the retro vibe while bitching about the film's pro-yuppification message.

The next day was one of Maura's work days, which meant that it was up to my friend and me to entertain ourselves, which usually meant walking up Mass Ave from Central to Harvard, checking out the used vinyl stores along the way, and grabbing some Cafe Aventura pizza at the end of the trip. This time, though, my friend had unspecified "plans" to attend to and left me to fly solo.

I did, though in a more purpose-driven fashion than usual, figuring that I'd pick up a used copy of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack (the songs and good memories were still fresh in my head) then try and meet Maura at Alewife Station, as it was where I caught the bus back to Woburn anyway and a stone's throw from the hotel where she was working at the time. Imagine my surprise when I stepped onto the Alewife concorse and discovered my punk rock pal already waiting there.

It was nothing compared to his surprise as his stammered out some excuses about medical appointments and hoping to run into me and so forth. As much as I hate rushing to judge, something about his language and mannerisms stunk worse than Alewife Brook's shopping carriage-filled waters in late August. After a few minutes of stilted conversation, Maura arrived, though circumstances prevented me from directly asking her if she had any knowledge about what the hell was going on.

It turned out that she didn't, and it wouldn't be revealed to her until the following Sunday evening. That was when my so-called pal, high on John Hughes's brand of sentimental melodrama and unrealistic expecations, showed up on Maura's parents' doorstep to profess his love for her (and be shot down in the brutally blunt manner for which my other half is reknowned for).

So, yeah. "Bring on the Dancing Horses" is a lovely bit of alternapop, and perhaps the finest track Mr. Echo and Friends ever recorded. It also induces an almost inperceptable reflexive grimace whenever I listen to it. This is why I've strenuously lobbied to have all teen romantic comedies labeled with a "MCABIDF" warning -- "May Cause Absurd Behavior In Deluded Fools."

(One final note: If you happen to live in a Super Tuesday state and are disgusted as much as I am by the slate of candidates, "Bamboo Harvest" would make a perfect choice for a spite-in -- I mean "write in" -- candidate. The poor palamino has been dead for thirty-eight years, but I still have more confidence in his leadership skills than in any of the current roster of clowns.)

Albums That Meant Something - Part 2 - Double Shot of Punkitude

During my bygone undergrad days, I took a course titled "The Sociology of the Vietnam War" where the mix of students was roughly split between Vietnam veterans and twenty-somethings with an interest in the subject. During the first class session, the professor, a compact dynamo of an ex-Marine who had seved a couple tours on the DMZ (and who would occasionally straighten his nonexistent tie in a nonexistent mirror while lecturing), announced a blanket ban on personal anecdotes about the war. His reason for this was, in his words, "because once we start flinging the bullshit around it gets too hard to stop, and next thing you know, we'll all be neck deep in it."

When I was a kid, I knew that my dad was a soldier who served with the Special Forces in Southeast Asia, and that would be the entirety of my knowledge on that front until I was a teenager and Platoon rekindled popular interest (and a wave of historical revisionism) regarding the Vietnam War. These days, it is impossible to hold even the most mudane conversation with the Old Man without having his in-country experiences brought up at least three or four times. I don't say this to belittle the man, only to illustrate a point -- as we get older, we tend to romanticise our individual "shining moments" (or "big experiences") and foreground them in our own personal mythologies. My wary ambivalence regarding such things has tended to color how I feel about my modest store of Punk Rock Stories^TM.

After all, I'm only in my mid-thirties. That's hardly an age where one ought to let past accomplishments decisively define oneself -- especially when said accomplishments weren't great shakes to start. Sure, I can cherry pick a handful of interesting moments, but the real truth is that they're tied into the context of a period full of embarassing fuckups, failed relationships, and obnoxious behavior, and the clouds of guilt continue to linger to the present day.

Which is just a long-winded way of stating that I'm a little self-conscious about discussing that period of my life. Sometimes, though, it can't be helped, like when writing about two albums that played a major role in my conversion from lukewarm thrash metal enthusiast to punk rockitude. I got into (or rather, "back into") metal in the early weeks of 1989, by a process of workplace osmosis. Most of my co-workers at the hospital were headbanging voc-tech or college students, and despite my soul boy leanings I started to warm up to the sonic assault of Slayer's South of Heaven and Flotsam & Jetsam's No Place for Disgrace after hearing them played for the zillionth time during the workday.

While I dug the music's aggro vibe, the small-c conservatism of the suburban metalhead culture didn't sit well with me. The accent on technical virtuosity and cartoony-yet-po'faced posturing felt self-limiting and in a lot of cases (like the time I got stuck listening to my co-workers gush over Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever) outright absurd. As a consequence, I found myself looking for something that better fit the undefinable qualities I was craving, and that something turned out to be the Repo Man soundtrack, the first punk album I ever purchased.

Alex Cox's 1984 punk rock sci-fi masterpiece was already a favorite film of mine, which is what led me, in the spring of 1989 to pick up a copy of the soundtrack. Hearing the songs outside the context of the film for the first time was a transformative experience. There it was -- in tracks by the likes of Iggy Pop, Fear, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and Suicidal Tendencies -- all the aggression that drew me to metal, with none of the excess and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, to boot. It's what I meant in my previous installment when I said that a great punk song sounds like something you've been waiting to hear since birth. The fact that my sense of fashion at the time -- boots, buzzcut, jeans, flannels, and t-shirts -- unintentionally matched the punk template presented in the movie only added to the sense that I'd found my subcultural place in the sun.

Iggy Pop - Repo Man (from the Repo Man OST, 1984)

Like any overly enthusiastic convert, I tried to turn my metalhead friends onto the wonders of the album, only to be given a response of "the punk stuff's cool, if rough, but what's up with that Mexican shit?" "That Mexican shit" referred to the tracks by L.A. punk legends The Plugz, whose Latin/space/surf contributions to the soundtrack (and the film's instrumental score, which itself deserved release as a separate album) best exemplified what I had been looking for that no morose power ballad could ever deliver.

From that starting point, my collection of punk albums grew by leaps and bounds during the summer of 1989. My purchases were largely centered around the SoCal hardcore acts featured on the Repo Man OST, which in turn led me to the Decline of Western Civilization, and so forth and so on. Money being tight at the time, I tended to shy away from unknown quantities in favor of a protracted game of Six Degrees of Punk Compilations (at least until I came under the tutelage of one of the cooks at the hospital, an old school punk rocker who offered valuable listening guidance). One exception to the rule was a near-blind purchase of 1982's This Is Boston, Not L.A. compilation, based solely on hazy memories of the title track being used in a Newbury Comics TV spot a few years previous. (The album was released on Newbury Comics' house label, Modern Method.)

Thirty tracks clocking in at under thirty-seven minutes total (the CD re-release includes six tracks from the Unsafe at Any Speed 7"), the compilation features a mix of local hardcore acts that push the "harder, louder, faster" aesthetic to the theoretical limit (Gang Green, Jerry's Kids, The F.U.'s) as well as midtempo punk by Cape Cod legends The Freeze and Marxist art punk by The Proletariat. I favored the latter bands over the former, but the compilation had the effect of opening up my eyes to the local scene and convincing me to track down whatever material I could find by any and all the bands featured on it. (Sadly, by the late 80's several of the bands had drifted into metallic or other unpleasant musical directions. I did like Jerry's Kids' cover of La Peste's "Spymaster" on the 1989 Kill Kill Kill LP, though.)

Jerry's Kids - Uncontrollable

The Freeze - Trouble If You Hide

Repeat plays of these two albums consisted the bulk of my listening habits for the long, hot summer of 1989...at least until I purchased The Clash's first album sometime in early August.

Albums That Meant Something - Part 1 - Punk and Disorderly

The smell of rose red Manic Panic hair dye -- that strangely familiar melange of root vegetable and grandma's attic -- is what immediately comes to mind whenever I listen to the first Punk and Disorderly album.

I've been spending so much time discussing and mocking things comics-related that I feel like I've gotten away from the original purpose of this blog, which was...something I've never actually defined, but I'm sure it didn't involve an endless series of out of context Firestorm panels. In any case, I thought I'd try something a little different (roughly inspired by Bully's "Wodehouse a Week" feature) and focus on some albums that have strong personal significance to yours truly. First up is Punk and Disorderly, a 1982 compliation featuring some of the most popular tracks within the then-contemporary Britpunk scene. (As per my usual manner, expect it to be long on autobiographical ramblings and short on actual musical criticism.)

For all the "been there, done that" credibility my punk rocker days has bestowed upon me in my relatively small circle, the truth of the matter is that the late 80's and early 90's were a really depressing time to be into the scene. In fact, I'm not even sure there was a scene, per se -- a few holdouts and dead-enders mixed in with various fellow travellers and far too many photostated skinheads and hardcore enthusiasts, all atomized into little knots of a half dozen kids or less who tended to "know of," rather than "know" the other participants.

Punk's media presence (at large and in the Boston area) at the time was virtually nil. The local paper might write up the odd review of an Exploited or G.B.H. gig (both acts long since gone rather metal in sound and following) along with panicked articles about suburban skinheads, but otherwise there was next to nothing. Even the 'zine scene was fairly anemic.

Looking back on those days, I'm reminded a lot of A Canticle for Leibowitz and its numerous thematic imitators -- my friends and I halfassedly reverse engineering a subculture out of scattered bits and fragments with only the slightest framework (and the recollections of a few older scene vets) to work with. Some old fanzines or issues of Creem, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, taped copies of Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia, and Urgh!, a copy of the Who's New Wave in Music discography discovered collecting dust in the library -- all pored over and assimilated into the collective mythmaking process.

Musically, too, the options were severely limited...at least until one got a hold of a functioning turntable and access to the used vinyl scene. Otherwise one was stuck (even at the hipper stores) with the big name legends (Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, Siouxsie, Dead Kennedys), the critical darlings (Wire, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Buzzcocks), and a slew of hardcore and demi-metal bands. If one dug around enough, it was possible to turn up bootleged cassettes of X-Ray Spex or the Slits, but those represented the furthest frontier of easily obtained material for the suburban punker. (I'm not saying that wasn't good enough, only that the horizons barely extended past the length of one's arm.) As a result, a lot of my peers gravitated to the then-thriving local ska and industrial scenes, with their frequent shows and (relative) wealth of recorded material.

So this was the environment I was operating in when, in early 1991, I was flipping through the "punk/hardcore/metal(?)" section at the Newbury Comics in Burlington and came across a copy of the Posh Boy re-release of Punk and Disorderly. The coal black sleeve and magenta lettering, framing a picture of honest-to-goodness leather jacketed mohicans, immediately got my attention. That I only knew a couple of the bands featured on the comp -- the Exploited, G.B.H. and the Dead Kennedys (and didn't particularly care for the first two) -- didn't matter as much as finding something that existed outside the usual narrow parameters.

Listening to the album for the first time was nothing short of a revelation, a first glimpse into a scene (and sound) outside the American hardcore and Class of '77 traditions (though certainly favoring the latter). The album served up a dark tapestry of nuclear nightmares (Vice Squad's "Last Rockers," The Insane's "Last Day"), political agitprop (Red Alert's "In Britain"), and terrace chants (Blitz's "Someone's Gonna Die"), with a sound that was simultaneously cruder yet more melodic than the SoCal hardcore I cut my punker teeth on. If the production on many of the tracks was pretty dodgy, it only added to the exotic ambiance -- as if my stereo was picking up stray transmissions from a distant time and place, which it was, figuratively speaking.

Most importantly, it opened previously unknown vistas of listening and record buying to explore, and a large percentage of the vinyl I acquired over the next couple of years was purchased with an eye toward the bands featured on the compilation or fellow participants in the early 80's Britpunk scene, meaning I bought scores of overpriced 7" singles and iffy Oi! comps (which frequently included mislabled and otherwise unavailable Britpunk gems amidst the slurry). It put me on a path that would eventually lead me to the transformative power of Crass and anarcho-punk scene, but that's a story for another time, I think.

UK Decay - For My Country - Punk and Disorderly also marked my first encounter with UK Decay's work, specifically this operatic track that finds the band in transition between their punk roots and groundbreaking gothic leanings. Thus started a fierce love affair with the band that has continued to the present day.

Demob - No Room For You - In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus stated that a good punk song sounds like the best thing in the world while it's playing. I'd amend that to say that a great punk song sounds like something you've been waiting your entire life to hear, which is how I felt when I first heard "No Room For You." It's kind of a more depressing punk version of The Kinks' "Come Dancing," though it actually predates that track by a couple of years.

listen to me, listen to me

When I was eight years old, my paternal grandmother and my father's youngest sister moved in with us. The reasons for it were kind of complicated, but can summed up by saying that my grandfather wasn't nearly as good a scam artist as he thought he was, and when the bill for his various hustles came due he fled the state rather than face the music. It was left to my parents to pick up the pieces, which included cramming two more bodies -- an addle-minded stroke victim with delusions of misremembered grandeur and a teenage girl -- into our already cramped North Woburn apartment.

Though my parents' clashing insanities were the ultimate cause of my familiy's implosion, I've long held it was that fucked up domestic paradigm shift that sent things teetering down the path to disaster.

But the the point of explaining that chapter of my life was not to induge in a round of Dysfunctional Family Follies: The Weiss Edition, but to bring up an incidental aspect of the period. As I said, the new arrangement brought an instant older "sister" into my life in the form of my aunt, five years my senior. Prior to her arrival in the house, my musical tastes reflected those of my parents and childhood peers, which meant the Beatles, too much 70's singer-songwriter and soft rock, and AC/DC. Oh, and the Grease soundtrack, which was nigh-unavoidable in schoolyard circles back then.

My aunt was not a punk rocker or new waver by any stretch of the imagination, but she was a teenybopper who listened to a lot of rock radio at a period when bands in those genres could be heard fairly often on either the local mainstream rock stations or the fledgling local "alternative" station, WFNX. Because I was young, impressionable, and sharing the same confined space with my aunt, the songs and bands I heard then imprinted themselves indelibly on my subconscious mind. Not in a radical life- or taste-changing way -- I was too busy obsessing over X-Men comics and Dig Dug, and my punk fandom wouldn't begin until my late teens -- but in a true IPCRESS fashion, unexploded mnemonic ordnance lying dormant in anticipation of the correct trigger sequences.

It's why, when I bought a copy of The Clash's debut album in the late 1980's, I discovered that I already knew the lyrics and chord progressions by heart. It's also why, when listening to my custom new wave playlist on Christmas Eve, I felt like someone tossed me under the suppressed memory train after hearing these two tracks back to back:

The Swingers - Counting the Beat (from Counting the Beat, 1981) - Oh, what glorious cocktail of backbeats and understated elegance. Formed from the Phil (ex-Split Enz) Judd faction of New Zealand's Suburban Reptiles, The Swingers also appeared and performed in Gillian Armstrong's 1982 new wave musical Starstruck (which will be spotlighted in a upcoming post now that I have my USB turntable).

Fischer-Z - So Long (from Going Deaf for a Living, 1980) - One thing that's great about pop music is that a skilled performer can take a perfectly obnoxious concept like self-pity and turn it into a thing of genuine pathos and beauty...

...which a less musically talented person feeling similiar emotions can listen to while sobbing into his pillow, punching parking meters or writing incoherent, wounded screeds on his MySpace page.

my blood runs cold

I spent a decent-sized chunk of my pre-adolescence at the local Boys’ Club, which is odd considering how much I loathed the place. I lay that paradox at the feet of peer pressure from my friends and the irresistible force generated by the mother of all childhood horrors, the cluelessly proactive parent. “It will be good for you,” they say as they pack you into the family sedan or set a slab of cooked liver in front of you, and no amount of whining or passive-aggressive manipulation can save you from your assigned date with destiny. Also, the club was one of the few places in the area at the time that possessed arcade videogame machines and was accessible to a ten year old. It’s amazing how effective the prospect of blasting Galaxians was at overcoming my better judgment.

Once the dollar I had been given for lunch had been converted to quarters and pissed away on Pac-Man or Lunar Lander (a process that took twenty minutes, tops), the bitter realization that I was trapped set in -- trapped in a shark tank full of semi-feral latchkey kids whose parents saw the club’s six dollar annual membership fee as an utter steal compared to the cost of a year’s worth of babysitter fees.

For all the PR and promo footage of kids learning how to build bitchin’ go-karts or woodworking skills, there really wasn’t a hell of a lot to do at the local Boys’ Club if you weren’t into shooting hoops or swimming (providing it was an open gym or free swim period). The game room was where the non-sporty set hung out, but the cooler fixtures, like the pool tables, were in perpetual use by the older boys, who weren’t inclined to let the snot-nosed rabble play through. The creaky foosball table was a mildly diverting alternative option, providing the prefect behind the main desk could locate a game ball. Even when such rare marvels occurred, there’s only so much foosball one can take (and the average person’s level of foosball tolerance is quite low, indeed).

With a full five hours to kill before being retrieved by a parent, time spent at the club resolved itself into a running down of the clock, either by wandering the Middlesex Canal path behind the club building, or, most usually, parking one’s ass on the cracked leather bench in the game room and watching long stretches of daytime TV on a wall-mounted 17” set. (The irony of this still staggers me.)

So, there I was, one afternoon in early 1982, watching some vaguely familiar celebrity try to lead a flustered corn-fed matron to the apex of Dick Clark’s $25,000 pyramid, and also keeping my eyes open lest one of many budding young sociopaths who haunted the club’s halls wandered into Indian burn distance. (Few places outside combat zones are as conducive towards one’s developing preternatural situational awareness as the club used to be.) I was in the process of formulating my strategy should I ever appear opposite Jimmy Walker in a struggle for cash and prizes when the club’s athletic director tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to participate in a bombardment tournament.

I said “yes.” I don’t know why, unless it was an early manifestation of the spontaneous bouts of recklessness that I have spent the past fifteen years attempting to suppress. If there is a game that I have no business playing, it is bombardment, a chancy bastardization of pin guard which itself is a chancy bastardization of dodge ball. It is a sport that devours skinny near-sighted kids with dubious athletic skills by the lab class-full, and yet one where I had a unique talent. The thing about being a skinny near-sighted kid with dubious athletic skills in an arena where aspiring sadists hurl red gym balls at high speeds is that I made an irresistible target, an irresistible target with a great facility for dodging thrown objects. Fixated on such, the opposition would toss game court tactics aside, thus making themselves easy pickings for my teammates.

A bombardment tournament? Why not? At the very least, I figured it would kill a couple of hours. Left unsaid in the invitation was that the tournament was being held two towns over, which I didn’t realize until my teammates and I were gathered in the club’s parking lot and being told to get into the coach’s van. (We don’ need no steenkeeg parental consent slips! I was a simpler time, then. These days the coach would have landed in jail.) We first made a quick stop at the Masonic Lodge by Horn Pond, presumably so the coach could pray for victory to the Invisible Overlords of the One World Order, before arriving at our destination, which may have been in either Arlington or Malden or Belmont. My geographical awareness at the time extended only to North Woburn and a few blocks of Woburn Center.

The club where the tournament was being held was one of the Boys’ Clubs they show in the TV commercials (and gave an early insight into Big Mama’s methods of social control through allocation of resources; this was definitely a double digit town, compared to our own 303 designation), and we marveled at its modernity before being shuttled off to the gym for the preliminary round. We acquitted ourselves admirably, with my skill in portraying the weak pigeon serving the team well. Four games later, we had reached the final four bracket, and it looked like we just might walk away with the title (which I never found out the name of). Then we went up against the kids from South Boston…

The fact that they wore matching uniforms should have been a warning. Anyone who makes the effort to have team shirts (complete with a picture of their mascot) printed up is a force to be reckoned with. The boyish rambunctiousness which springs from north suburban sandpits and subdivisions is a mild summer breeze compared to the tempest born of Southie’s housing projects and triple-decker row houses. We were slaughtered in a matter of moments. My weak pigeon decoy tactics didn’t matter; as far as the lads from Broadway were concerned, we were all weak pigeons ready to be plucked and roasted.

…and we were okay with that, given that our team hadn’t even existed a few hours previous. On the ride back home, we compared welts and enviously discussed the Vanguard machine in the hosting club’s game room. The coach turned on the van’s radio, which was tuned to WBCN, Boston’s main rock radio station, and it was then that I heard what seemed to be the best song ever, “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band. The cheesy organ and whistling bits, the fake “ending,” the naughty-yet-radio-friendly subject matter – it was tailor made for plucking the strings of pre-adolescent “rawk” fans, and we listened in rapt attention from the beginning until the final fade out, after which one of my teammates told us about the video, which “had that girl from MTV in it.” (Martha Quinn, so the rumor said, but wasn’t true.)

I couldn’t wait to hear it again, and in true W.W. Jacobs fashion, I soon got my wish fulfilled in a most unpleasant manner, where it seemed that nothing but “Centerfold” was being played 24/7 across the dial. The song soon devolved into audio wallpaper, heard but not listened to, familiar beyond contempt, with no personal resonance remaining outside of its role as a trigger for nostalgic reveries.

Eh, works for me…

The J. Geils Band – Centerfold (from Freeze Frame, 1981) – I’ve long since reached the point where I can recreate the song, note-perfect, from memory. So much so, in fact, that the real version now sounds a bit off to me.

…and for those of you who like to live life on the edge, within reasonably agreed upon limits established after weeks of intense consideration, here are two cover versions of the track – an outstanding southern-fried rendition by Hayseed Dixie and a very…Eurodance-y…Eurodance version by Captain Jack:

Hayseed Dixie – Centerfold (from Let There Be Rockgrass, 2002)

Captain Jack – Centerfold (from Party Warriors, 2002)