it felt like we'd been here

Being the only licensed driver in house, I'm the one who provides transportation to and from Boston Derby Dames bouts on those occasions when Maura decides to go stag. The matches are held at the Shriners' Auditorum in Wilmington (a.k.a. "The Land of Nod"), not far at all from my old North Woburn stomping grounds.

In the summer, making the long ride down Fordham Road to the venue with Super Lumina's windows rolled down, it hard not to notice a certain aroma -- a melange of evergreen, scrub foliage, and diesel scents -- wafting in the late afternoon breeze. It's the smell of my childhood.

I lived in North Woburn until the fall of 1984, when my family left our first floor apartment on the corner of Merrimac and Dartmouth Street and moved into the other side of my maternal grandparents' duplex in Woburn Center. I think about the old neighborhood surprisingly often, though my visits (or rather "pass-throughs," as there's no reason to stop and get out of the car these days) have gotten more and more infrequent. The landscape has changed too much since the early 1980's, and the dissonance between "what was" and "what is" is the stuff of fever dreams -- ghosts of eradicated landmarks superimpose themselves over the upstart subdivisions and McMansions that now occupy their previous spaces.

But then Woburn, especially the part of the city north of I-95 and west of I-93, has been a developmental palimpsest as far back as I can remember. That was what made it such a fascinating place in which to spend one's childhood. Despite the push towards modern office parks as upscale replacements for the tanneries and chemical plants, the the scars and mouldering remains of the old industries remained -- crumbling foundations and discarded machinery half concealed under nature's attempts to reclaim the open spaces.

"Down Back," the tract of land stretching from NELCO (New England Leadburning Company, founded by my great-great-grandfather) to the edge of the city dump was a playground beyond compare, criss-crossed with the BMX-friendly remains of pulled up train tracks and chock-full of piles of illegally discarded junk. A ten-year old with more curiosity than sense (and, hopefully, an up-to-date tetanus vaccination) could unearth all kinds of treasures from the refuse, from animal skulls to a collection of turn-of-the-century postcards to creased and weatherbeaten porn mags to all sorts of things construct a hastily made go-kart with before sending it careening down Chester Avenue. One of the more disturbing finds my crew made was several sacks of arsenic, dumped by the side of the path so as to return that ultra-toxic goodness back to the soil, I suppose. Or because some lazy cheap fuck couldn't be bothered to dispose of it properly.

Coexisting with this graveyard of industry past were many rustic elements. A couple of the residents (including my paternal grandparents, and later, my aunt) at the far end of the neighborhood had horse stables, chicken coops, and even the occasional goat on their land. Though only a short ten miles from downtown Boston, North Woburn was on the far edge of the suburban fringe (which has since spilled northward over the I-95 boundary, brushing up against and even crossing the New Hampshire border. Check the tags on southbound vehicles on any given morning commute, and you'll see what I mean). While not as honky-tonk as, say, Billerica or Tewksbury was at the time, there was a certain blue-collar ethnic hillbilly character to the neighborhood, though fading fast even back then under the influence of newer arrivals but still manifested though the occasional buckshot-perforated stop sign or raccoon pelt nailed to a tree for drying.

As a kid, I wasn't really aware of the neighborhood's unique atmosphere. In fact, I was thrilled when my family moved as it put me within closer range of the places that sold comics, music, and other items of adolescent importance. Now that I'm older, and last traces of its identity have given way to a sedate aura of suburbanity, I find myself reflecting about how lucky I was to have had such a place to spend my formative years in, full of wide open spaces with maximum potential for childhood hijinx and where nine-year old kids could frolic free of adult supervision through industrial ruins.

Yeah, I know. Everyone feels nostalgic about their childhood haunts and thinks that they were something special and rare.

Mine really was, though.

Skeletal Family - Promised Land (from a 1985 single; collected on The Best of the Skeletal Family, 2001) - Not really a chant, and I'm clear on their ever-circling credentials, but it's a lovely bit of gothic rock from a time before the the genre devolved into mall-rats with black hoodies and Trent Reznor fixations.

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.

Halloween Countdown: October 25 – the colour out of sync

For today's installment of AT's Halloween Countdown, I bring you a fragment of nightmare culled from the forbidden grimiore of embarrassment that is the Weiss Family Photo Album:


Yes, that's your humble narrator in the middle, serving as a shocking reminder of the horrors associated with having an artist for a parent. I know my mom meant well, and it was a pretty innovative and well-executed costume, but it wasn't designed with a sense of awareness about how cruel eight-year-olds could be to a peer who shows up for the class Halloween party wearing a green dunce cap. Also, the issue of whether or not I wanted to go door to door on All Hallow's Eve dressed as a green crayon was never actually addressed amidst my mother's frenzy of creative inspiration. Dressing up in costume loses its luster when it's done under parental diktat. My little brother, dressed up as Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot, in the above photo, looks positively dignified in comparison.

Is it any wonder I've grown up to be a master of shirking obligations and avoiding mandates? Or that I can't even glance at a deluxe 64-color set of Crayolas without developing an odd facial tic?

Come to think of it, I can't think of any Halloween costume I ever wore as a kid that I actually liked, including the ones I came up with on my own. Part of the problem is the fact that it's cold up here in New England in late October, which leads to embarrassing costume compromises such as "Dracula in a Plaid Cardigan," "Chinos-under-Toga Julius Caesar" (I wanted to go as a Roman centurion, but again, mom had other ideas), or "Reluctant Green Crayon Wearing an Ugly-Ass Coat from Zayre's".

keep watching the skies

There it is – the first comic I distinctly remember owning, Gold Key’s UFO and Outer Space #14 from June 1978. I say distinctly because I do remember reading and owning other comics prior to that one, mostly Disney stuff with dollops of Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman folded over the years into a hazy mnemonic stew of disassociated panels and captions. (I used to have a coverless copy of this comic for years in the antique school desk my parents set up for me in the front porch, but I only remembered it recently when I came across another copy in the local comic shop’s back issue bins.) However, it was this repositioning (and reprinting, without regard for subsequent historical events) of the 1960’s UFO and Flying Saucers series to capitalize on the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that got me to thinking about comics as something separate from other forms of kid lit, and as a hobby in and of themselves. (Oh, for access to a working time machine….)

Yo, Earth-joik, the sign sez 'permit parking only!' Whassamatta, you can't read Lunarish?
The bagged three-pack the comic was in, along with another set which included this issue of Captain America (which may or may not have sparked my brother’s interest in Cap) was given to me by my father, who stole it from my uncle. I can’t recall the exact circumstances behind this petty theft. My father’s younger brother is what a charitable soul might call a character, meaning that he was the type of guy who would spin donuts in the police station parking lot while shouting “Cops eat shit” out the driver side window of his van or would get arrested by federal air marshals for using a hand puppet to lewdly proposition flight attendants while waiting for the plane to take off. There were several incidents during my childhood where my father would be called up to his parents house to “deal” with my uncle for whatever reason, and on that particular occasion he returned with spoils lifted from his wayward brother’s lair.

I suppose I could have snagged the Cap comics for myself and passed the Gold Key stuff onto my brother (who was two, and thus easy to manipulate), but like many a child of that era, I was utterly fascinated with the ubiquitous “phenomena” (a catch-all term encompassing various occult, paranormal, and other related topics) culture that was all the rage at the time. Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, Krillian photography – the whole pantheon of Fortean hobbyhorses found ample room to trot in the cultural flood plains cleared and fertilized by the countercultural surge of the 1960’s, and young Andrew’s childhood imagination was captivated by the lot of it.

Excerpt from Wally Wood's lost masterpiece, Andy Kaufman Versus The Martians.
My mother enabled such behavior by buying me various books on the subject. One particular one that both terrified and thrilled me was a British catalogue of the paranormal titled simply Phenomena. I flipped through it repeatedly (the articles on cattle mutilation and spontaneous human combustion were particular favorites) until the binding gave out, then shortly after accidentally left it out during a summer rainstorm, ruining it entirely. A couple years back I located a discarded library copy on Half.com for a princely sum of twenty-five cents, and took advantage of the low cost opportunity to revisit some childhood memories.

Just like a Vorgiblian... They'll tell you you're the only one for them, but no sooner than the anal probe is removed, they're reaching for their saucer keys and heading toward the door.
Of course, I’ve traveled quite a ways intellectually and philosophically in the past twenty-nine years. What had once been a gateway – both the comic and the book -- into a mysterious realm of the unknown now reads like the text for a remedial course in bullshit detection. Unreliable witnesses (read: “drunk hillbillies”)? Check. Unsourced stories or, even better, stories sourced to people or agencies behind the Iron Curtain? Check. Ample use of weasel words? Check. Selective application of scientific principles and theories? Check. Use of leading or misleading phrasing to hedge around Occam’s Razor? Check.

"Goddamn Z'yzzvxx told me he was using protection!"
Contrary to Thomas Wolfe, you can occasionally go home again. The only problem is that it is difficult to ignore the busted toilet, stained wallpaper, and torn linoleum upon your arrival.

The Unitarian Bible is weird.

The Rezillos – Flying Saucer Attack (from Can’t Stand the Rezillos, 1978) - So the world's being annihilated; there's no reason to be all po' faced or mopey about it.

Toyah Wilcox - Danced (from Sheep Farming in Barnet, 1979) - Or for those who've seen Urgh! A Music War, "Ashtar Command Jazzercize With Toyah."

she doesn’t wanna know me now

Because nothing on my "potential projects" plate is leaping out at me today, here’s some lazy content in the form of the “Eight Things People Don’t Know About Me” meme that’s been making the rounds as of late. This was a more difficult process than I anticipated, given the autobiographical/confessional nature of Armagideon Time.

1. Irises are my favorite type of flower. I like they way the look. I like they way the smell (sweet and vaguely lemony). There used to be random wild patches of them growing in the North Woburn woods when I was a kid.

2. I once shook hands with Larry Storch. I met him outside a theater where he was appearing in a play. My wife and her friend were huge fans of F-Troop, and were pen pals with the man otherwise known as Corporal Randolph Agarn. He seemed like a really nice guy.

3. In my senior year of high school, I won first place in the annual public speaking contest. I recited Colonel Kurtz’s “pile of little arms” speech from Apocalypse Now in a pseudo-Shatnerian manner. The prize for first place was forty dollars.

My grandmother refused to attend because I wouldn’t remove my earrings before going onstage. She insisted that “They’re all going to laugh at you.” Fortunately the night was free of pig’s blood and telekinetic mayhem.

4. I can play the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on both the flute and the piano. It is the only piece of music I know how to play, which suggests that there may be a genetic propensity toward enjoying Die Hard hardcoded into my being. Or that my grade school music teacher was a tyrant.

5. I have bits of gravel embedded in both kneecaps. The last day of my freshman year, I had a bad crackup on my brother’s scooter, and shredded my knees something fierce. I spent most of the following week alternating between long soaks in the tub and peroxide rinses. While most of the grit got cleaned out, some deeper fragments remained beneath my skin, and the dark splotches are still visible on my knees to this day.

6. If my family’s genealogical legends are to be believed, John and Priscilla Alden (of the Mayflower and the Plymouth Colony) and General Oliver Otis Howard (one of the founders of Howard University, Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, and the man who fucked over Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce) are among my distant ancestors.

7. I nearly drowned when I was two years old. I got too close to the waves at Plum Island and was sucked in by the undertow. A fisherman heard my cries, and pulled me out of the ocean. As a consequence, I can’t abide submerging my face in water.

8. The first record I owned was a copy of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I pulled out of a trash pile. The first record I ever purchased was AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

The Who – The Real Me (from Quadrophenia, 1973) - Really rockin'.

Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions – See the Real Me (from People Get Ready, 1965) - Really soulful.

it was a little bit frightening

Hey, kids, learn the secrets of the Way of the Open Palm from the comfort of your rumpus room! Never mind all that spiritual or philosophical “mumbo-jumbo.” You don’t want to waste time meditating like some boring bald dude on a Himalayan mountain peak -- you want to learn to kick some ass right out of the mailing envelope!

Hopefully the “simplified” instructions include responses for neutralizing the savage Parental-Fu techniques of “Why the FUCK is there a foot-shaped hole in the paneling?!?” and “Why is your mother’s favorite lamp lying in a dozen pieces on the carpet?” The road to self-taught martial art mastery is fraught with many such obstacles, grasshopper.

The childhood fascination with martial arts springs eternal, although it reached its fever peak in the early-to-mid 1970’s, when even a sleepy nondescript suburb like Woburn had a McDojo done up like a faux pagoda in the city center. (Even after the martial arts school went belly up, the ornamentation remained on the building for over a decade before finally falling victim to the city leaders’ quixotic desire to make the area look like a Currier and Ives print.) One couldn’t hit a library book sale or church fair in the early 1980’s without stumbling over a box full of creased paperbacks promising to explain the deadly secrets of “the Mysterious Orient” to the aspiring Shaolin master. (The previous masters having moved out of their parents’ houses and left behind their collections of sacred writings, Ted Nugent albums, and other mystical ephemera.)

My friends and I caught the kung fu bug during its mid-80’s mini-resurgence, which was largely fueled by Chuck Norris's piggybacking on Rambo’s coat tails and one of Michael Winslow’s Police Academy shticks. A major part of our training regimen consisted of flipping through various martial arts magazines, partially to glean some “Ninja Techniques for Beginners” but mostly to check out the ample assortments of ads offering “authentic” katanas, throwing stars, and other essential, kid-friendly gear for the Wanna-Bruce Lee.

The industrial park that bordered on my old neighborhood actually had a bona fide martial arts supply store within its confines. We used to ride past it on our Huffy BMX bikes and recite lists to each other of all the cool stuff we’d buy there as soon as we “saved enough money.” We also discussed rumors, passed on by older kids “in the know,” that the Chinese variety store by the projects sold a variety of sharp Asiatic implements to those fortunate to know the secret password.

In the end, we just made do with our own home-made gear. Nunchaku were fashioned from broom-handles linked with chain (nicked from parents’ garages or industrial sites). The thriving cottage industry in home shuriken making eventually led the junior high metal shop teacher to line everyone up at the end of each class in order to account for stray bits of sheet metal that may have “accidentally” fallen into students’ backpacks. (It may also have led said teacher to quit his job mid-semester for the greener pastures of a defense industry job.)

Armed with our improvised gear and wired to the gills on Fun Dip and Tahitian Treat (Do they make that anymore?), we’d duke it out Five Fingers of Death-style. Very little martial arts skills were exhibited, but we made up for it with a lot of shouting and jumping and accidental injuries of the sort that make me grateful I grew up in an era where our parents could afford comprehensive health insurance. (Important lesson: a carpet tack hammered in with a flat rock is not the proper method of securing a wooden flail head.)

Fun times, those. Raging dragons live forever, though, but so not little boys...

The more serious members of our sand pit tong eventually gravitated toward the real deal. For the rest of us, the numerous drills and practices just seemed like gym class dressed up in a gi, thus something to be avoided at all costs.

Bus Stop – Kung Fu Fighting (from a 1998 single) – A cover/remix of Carl Douglas’s 1974 funk novelty hit. The song has also appeared in Konami’s DDR series of rhythm games.

…and here’s a killer double bill of crazy 70’s kung fu-wakka-chikka insanity:

Lalo Schifrin – Enter the Dragon Main Title Theme (Alternate Version) (from the Enter the Dragon OST, 1998)

Dennis Coffey – Theme from Black Belt Jones (from a 1974 single)