my spells cannot be broke

The final gate stood before them, its adamantite bars shining in the flickering torchlight. Beyond lay the inner sanctum of the Gheshezimar the Witch King. The muscular half orc snorted dismissively. The stink of foul magic was heavy in the air. The end of his journey was near at hand, a quest for vengeance that had bought him across half of Xyrolia. Gheshezimar’s thrice-damned soul would join those of his spider-limbed minions in the Abyss.

The barbarian gripped the bars in his massive hands and attempted to lift the gate. The sinews in his shoulder blades knotted and popped with the strain, but the barrier would not lift. “By the fire caves of Zamphr!” he bellowed, “I shall not be denied!”

His slender companion stepped up to the gate. “Allow me,” he hissed, and made a quick gesture with his ebon fingers. Sparkling tendrils snaked from his hands and wrapped around the bars. Slowly the gate began to lift. The barbarian did not approve of such arcane trickery, but he had come to grudgingly respect Nightshade D’rozz’s talents during the many kizmals they had journeyed together. The dark elf mage had proven his worth once again.

No sooner had the gate opened than a shadowy form lunged from the dark passage beyond, screaming profane curses in the long dead language of the Lala-Bar. “A wraithling!” Nightshade screamed, and scrambled to prepare another spell. The half orc barbarian was quicker, and swung his massive axe at the attacker. The blade went wide of the target, shattering on the stone wall of the dungeon. The wightling closed in for the kill….

“What the hell? How could I have missed it? I’m swinging a dire axe that’s as wide as the passage and I have triple weapon specialization!”

“Well, if you account for the speed factor and the encumbrance penalty on initiative…”

“But the axe was forged by the Dwarfsmiths of Hron! It’s supposed to be unbreakable!”

“Um, yeah, well, I think there’s a table that covers that in the Big Dudes With Axes Survival Guide. Just give me a minute; I’m going to look it up. Wait, did I bring that book with me?”

“Aw, screw this. I’m going to see what’s on TV.”

Ah, the raw stuff of nerdy adolescent maleness, roughly shaped by popcult touchstones and polyhedral dice, and set to the dulcet peals of heavy metal thunder… It’s truly a wonder to behold.

I’ve played in hyper-sophisticated, tightly run role-playing campaigns where every in-game location has been mapped down to individual trees and bushes and the game master stressed the importance of “playing in character.” They were admirable, often enjoyable, efforts, but lacked the unrefined entertainment value derived from a cabal of socially awkward misfits cracking the seal on the Dungeons and Dragons Basic (“Red Box”) Set for the first time.

Give an experienced gamer a rule book, some dice, and a character sheet, and you’ll end up with “Eldremere Lightspear, Son of Ulthren, Protector of the Silver Forest and Bloodthrall of the Lady’s Kithband,” complete with a family tree, detailed backstory, and minute personal details.

Give the same to a fourteen year old boy in a Scorpions t-shirt circa 1985 and you’d get this:

Sophisticated characterization and internal logic are fine and all, but when you’re a geeky pubescent manchild trying to grapple with personal power fantasies, there’s nothing like kicking some ass in a dungeon haphazardly populated by a random assortment of the “coolest” monsters listed in the Fiend Folio (“’Cause that was, like, on sale for four bucks at Kay-Bee, and the Monster Manual was, like fifteen.”). It’s a realm where the rules, when properly understood (i.e. not often), are reduced to mere guidelines. The average strength score is 18/00 (the whole 18-slash-percentage strength rating for AD&D always struck me as rather stupid, and opened too many opportunities for meta-gaming), and every character is either a Half-Orc barbarian or multiclassed Dark Elf fighter/magic user/thief. Oh, and did I mention the harem girls?

It’s stupid, nonsensical, and immature (plus frequently sexist), but I have a certain weakness for that form of fantastical yearning. Unpretentious to a fault, it wore its patchwork of influences proudly on its sleeve. The Sword and the Sorcerer, Conan comics, metal and hard rock songs, pinball machine artwork – all thrown together in a steaming cauldron of testosterone, with the end result resembling an independently invented version of John Norman’s Gor as manifested in an eighth grader’s 3rd period English notebook. (Big thanks to the talented Dave Campbell for providing the excellent artwork that leads off today’s post. He nailed the concept perfectly.)

It might seem odd for me to wax nostalgic over such things, given my track record of bitching about the excesses of nerd behavior, especially those associated with the male side of the fan divide. It’s a matter of context, really. There are worse ways for an adolescent boy to work through his issues than projecting his self worth onto a larger than life fictional avatar named Doomhammer for a few months. As a step toward maturity, it’s no big deal, and kind of interesting to look back upon. As a developmental terminus, it’s creepy as fuck.

Even if I still gamed, I wouldn’t want to participate in such a campaign, even if it was possible to overcome my accumulated wisdom and approach it as fresh and free of irony as I did twenty-odd years ago. There are some aspects of youth that cannot be recaptured, no matter how hard one tries. I’ll just have to content myself by watching Deathstalker and The Warriors From Hell for the umpteenth time.

Improbably named and costumed characters? Check. Happens in a universe that is not so much a physical location as an abstract series of events linked together with the thinnest of plot threads? Check. The hero is an obnoxious asshole? Check. Acts of derring-don’t-make-much-sense? Check. Despite the absence of a heavy metal soundtrack, Deathstalker and The Warriors From Hell is the purest realization of a beginner’s D&D run ever caught on film. Potatoes are what we eat.

On to today’s xvart-stomping, blade-swinging, well-oiled and waxed collection of songs:

It’s kind of funny to consider that heavy metal’s fixation with fantasy themes grew out of the 60’s hippie counterculture, by way of Led Zeppelin’s shared fascination with Tolkien and Black Sabbath’s incorporation of 70’s occultist elements, with some Wagnerian (Richard, not Jack) bombast thrown in for good measure. It’s not that long a road from the peace sign to the mark of the beast, if you think about it.

Dio – Holy Diver (from Holy Diver, 1983) – I probably could have skipped all the overblown writing today and just posted this track and its video, which sum things up more effectively than my tortured prose ever could. (Did you know there was a NES game based on this song? Friend CJ has the scoop.)

Savatage – Hall of the Mountain King (from Hall of the Mountain King, 1987) – I saw Savatage open for Testament back in the late 80’s. I can’t remember if was at the Orpheum or the Channel, which reveals two embarrassing facts about me:

1. I can be very forgetful.
2. I paid to see Testament twice.

Don't forget to catch the video. It's priceless.

Deep Purple – Stormbringer (from The Very Best of Deep Purple, 2000) – Blood and souls for my Lord Blackmore! Thank you, Tanelorn! The Last Emperor of Melniboné says “Goodnight!”

in theatres today

This ain’t no Chatty Cathy art film, folks. AT:TM is an overbudgeted cinematic juggernaut jampacked with gratuitously implausible CGI effects and plot holes wide enough to accommodate a fleet of tricked out Hummers.

This film has it all:

Action!

Naz Nomad and The Nightmares – Action Woman (from Give Daddy the Knife, Cindy, 1984) – This is The Damned, posing as a forgotten sixties garage rock act for a one off album of period cover songs. The Litter, a Minneapolis garage band, first recorded this track in 1967, and Vanian, Scabies and company manage to pull off their own authentic sounding version that doesn’t simply clone the original.

Danger!

Rough Cut – Danger Boy (from a 1981 single) – Pretty good femvox punk out of Detroit. Have I mentioned that I'm a pushover for this kind of stuff?

Excitement!

Le Tigre – I’m So Excited (from This Island, 2004) – I’d lump This Island in with Fischerspooner’s Odyssey as examples of how certain bands can be too slickly produced for their own good. Both albums are entirely listenable and even enjoyable to a certain degree, but the sparks of genius that originally drew me to the acts’ earlier works have been blanched out in the mix. The end results are agreeable but fairly generic. This excellent Pointer Sisters’ cover was a welcome exception.

A killer movie deserves a killer theme song, and nothing beats “Bravely Folk Song,” the Cervantes Stage BGM from the 1996 fighting game, Soul Edge (Soul Blade in the States). This track, from Namco Sound Team’s Super Battle Attack Soul Edge, would be my choice of anthem should my dreams of world domination ever come to fruition. (This would be after my global purge of any and all snarky fanboys bold enough to point out where I lifted the theme from. Absolute power has its rewards.)

Edit: I almost forgot -- every blockbuster flick needs plenty of explosions....

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.

what about prom?

I was browsing my collection of Billboard Top 100 single sets for post ideas when I ran across this track, number twenty-four from 1988:

Richard Marx – Hold on to the Nights (from Richard Marx, 1987)

Another sappy pop song from an era lousy with them, right? Except this sappy pop song happened to be Woburn High's Class of 1990 senior prom theme, and coming across it triggered a crippling bout of mnemonic nausea. Willful suppression only goes so far where memories of adolescent angst are concerned.

The track’s surface qualities aren’t noticeably different than other works in the same vein – Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” or REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” It’s a bit of bog-standard MOR pop nonsense, ideal prom theme material and the soundtrack to countless teenage ass gropes masquerading as “slow dances.”

Musically speaking, I don’t think it’s possible to come up with a worse year to hold a prom than 1990. The DJ’s playlist was etched in blood on parchment made from the skin of a murdered infant. Sure, John Cusack was able to showcase his hipster cred during the Class of ’87 reunion scenes in Grosse Pointe Blank, but anyone who has been on the front lines knows the truth. Instead of Tones On Tail and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the reality would be Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”. It’s the same story throughout history; loads of Baby Boomers claim they were at Woodstock, no one owns up to buying the 45 of “Sugar Shack”.

Here’s what we were treated to on that May evening at the Danversport Yacht Club:

Milli Vanilli – Blame It on the Rain (from Girl You Know It’s True, 1989) – I know it’s an old, old joke, but that album title still brings a smile to my face.

The Bangles – Eternal Flame (from Everything, 1988) – A girl I dated in college dragged me across metro Boston from record shop to record shop in search of this song/LP. A full account of those events will be detailed in my forthcoming self-help tome, Obvious Relationship Warning Signs: How To Spot Them and Act Before It’s Too Late, You Dense Idiot.

I hardly needs to be said, but these are not the sort of tracks likely to impress a alt-rock girl into snowboarding and Jane’s Addiction, i.e. my prom date. As the night wore on, my mulletheaded and big-haired classmates bopped to the gluten-enriched whitebread soul of Rick Astley and the well-intentioned nightmarish teen pop of Debbie Gibson, and I watched my romantic schemes wither and rot on the vine.

“What do you think of the prom?”

“It’s nice.”

What do you think of the food?”

“It’s nice.”

The long, quiet ride back to her house and the quick peck on the cheek as she exited the car was merely a sad epilogue to the evening’s events.

Shit, that was depressing. How about I make it up with some “reel” life prom themes?

Josie Cotton – He Could Be the One (from Convertible Music, 1982) – The not-quite-PC “Johnny, Are You Queer?” (originally written for the Go-Go’s) is the Josie Cotton track most folks remember from the movie Valley Girl, but this is the song that plays as Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman flee the prom. It’s a great piece of new wave pop with retro sixties touches.

OMD – If You Leave (from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, 1986) – This track really needs no explanation. If you’re among the scores of folks who thought Ducky got a raw deal at the end of the film, there’s a new version of Pretty In Pink out on DVD that includes the original ending where he hooks up with Molly Ringwald’s character. John Hughes changed the ending partly because he thought it sent a wrong message that rich kids and poor kids don’t belong together. Fuck John Hughes.