Halloween Countdown: October 1 - and other things that go bump in the night

October 2008 has begun, which means it's time to kick off another Countdown to Nightmare. Prepare yourself for thirty-one days of groovy ghoulishness plucked from the darkest depths of my popcult catacombs and served up with a garnish of the finest wolfsbane.

The Playlist of the Damned has been finalized. Dare you confront its terrifying (and occasionally goofy) contents?

Ministry - (Everyday Is) Halloween (from a 1985 single; collected on Twelve Inch Singles, 1985) - Too obvious? Probably. It also has the "a bloo bloo everyone thinks I'm a freak" vibe going on, which is usually the kiss of death where my interest is concerned. Still, there's something about this very 80's slice of dance pop that I find irresistible...unlike Ministry's later industrial metal output, which sounded great when I was 19 and less so with each passing year.

I still can't figure out where Al Jourgensen's British accent came from, though.

(Note: Even pronounced WOO-BIN is getting into the seasonal spirit!)

multiversal bandstand

The Batusi may be the most (in)famous of novelty dances inspired by comic book characters, but there were scores of others that never managed to register on the masscult consciousness. Here's a brief rundown of some of the more notable ones:

The Element Man - A visually exciting set of moves set this dance apart from the rest of the pack, but the fact that only those who had been exposed to the Orb of Ra could properly perform the steps kept it from achieving widespread appeal.

The Funky Robot - Easy to perform, with low rhythmic requirements, the Funky Robot's strengths turned out to be its greatest weakness. So easy that even one's super-dad could do it, the dance quickly became associated with polyester-addicted squares and new age family therapy sessions.

The Tula-Hula - A huge hit at Dr. Dorsal's Deep Sea Discoteque (sic), this five-fathom fad bit the dust when astronomical litigation fees (stemming from an unexpected migration of tiger sharks onto the dancefloor) forced Dorsal to shutter his doors.

The Kirby Shuffle - He's just one man! But he busts moves like a whirlwind! There ain't no stoppin' him! He's like a one man rave!

The Hypno Hustle - This interesting attempt to mix disco and subliminal indoctrination might have made a bigger impact if the required modifications to the club's PA system weren't as prohibitively expensive. Blame the Latverian glitter ball embargo of 1977.

The Roly Poultry - Hyped as the successor to the Macarena and The Ketchup Song dance, the Roly Poultry fad died a quiet well-deserved death within hours of its debut. This has not, however, stopped lesser DJs or drunken great-uncles from occasionally trying to resuscitate the abomination on the wedding circuit.

The Jeffetty John - A sad reminder of the scene's creative bankruptcy, in which the moves of past crazes are awkwardly linked together and given a veneer of "shocking" edginess. Arguments regarding its popularity on the dance floor rarely take into the downward spiral of insularity that has gripped the subculture over the past two decades.

Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 Dances (from The Exciting Wilson Pickett, 1966) - The Hokey Pokey is Dance #231. The Taffy Pull is Dance #879. The Cabbage Patch is Dance #666.

Trans X - Safety Dance (from On My Own, 1988) - Changing hands from one Canadian synthpop act to another.

visual synergy: sham on you

Sam the Sham (and the Pharaohs)!

Shampoo!

The Shamen!

Sham 69!

ShamWow!
Sham 69 - Borstal Breakout (from a 1978 single; collected on the re-issue of Tell Us the Truth, 1978) - Sure, it's dumb as hell, but this driving blast of street punk never fails to grab me by the short hairs and set my blood a'pumping...and that's what really matters.

when you put it that way

Scholastic's Dynamite used to run a regular feature titled "Super-Heroes Confidential," much adored by my younger self yet completely forgotten about until I flipped through the recently purchased stack of mid-1970's issues of the defunct kiddie magazine.

It was a pretty nifty (and corporately ecumenical) method of genre evangelism from a time when kids were still the primary target audience for superhero comics. Each installment spotlighted a specific superhero -- mostly Marvel and DC characters, though I vaguely remember some representatives of the King Features comic strip stable getting face time -- with a smartly recolored reprint of the character's origin story followed with a single page FAQ covering other details and semi-pertinent information.

In a time before The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe or Who's Who in the DCU and the ready availability of comprehensive reprint collections, it offered the tykes a handy little infodump (and an opportunity to read otherwise unavailable material) to kindle the flames of nacent fandom...even if for only a short while.

The FAQ sections are especially priceless, as they attempted to distill months and years of often slapdash sequential storytelling into a couple of sentences of kid-friendly plain text. It may have escaped my notice at the time, but these nuggets of continuity-laden (and now, thanks to the endless circular grind of the medium, mostly out-of-date) trivia highlight the stupidity and absurdity of the genre in a manner that surpasses works such as Watchmen or Marshal Law.

For instance, check out this explanation of Captain America's romantic take on "family values," from a 1974 issue of Dynamite:

Naturally!
Jeepers, Cap, she's only (Agent) 13!

Roger McGuinn - American Girl (from Thunderbyrd, 1977) - I have nothing but the utmost respect for Roger McGuinn, both for his role in The Byrds and his subsequent solo career, but this baffling take on a Tom Petty classic is just wrong.....though not nearly as wrong as fucking the sexy younger sister of your middle-aged former flame.

Dead or Alive - Brand New Lover (from Rip It Up, 1987) - Don't look at me like that. Claim as much indie/punk rock cred as you want; we all have dance pop skeletons in our musical closets.

x marks the dance mix

Punky meets funky in this week's Sunday b-side selection ripped from the flip side of X's 1984 "Wild Thing" 12-incher:

X - True Love Pt. #2 (Club Remix)

It's more reminscent of the B-52's than the Bukowskian punk rock sound the legendary L.A. quartet was most famous for, but that's the mid-1980's for you. Things were different then.

Even though I was a fan of the X before I even met Maura, I can't help but think of them as one of "her" bands, partly because she was the one who instituted the mandatory X requirement for in-car mix CDs (before Super Lumina's CD player shit the bed and we switched to using a Zune for driving music). Maura got a chance to see the original line-up of the band during the Boston leg of their 31st anniversary tour a couple weeks back, a performance she succinctly described as "awesome."

She also got the opportunity to add the following photo featuring X guitarist Billy Zoom...


...to her small collection of "Maura hugs her punk rock heroes" shots. (See also.)

the choice is made with a fresh resolve

It's a beautiful spring day up here on Mt. Misery. Even though I still have a little ways to go before I reach full functionality again, it's time I put aside the emo-rbidity of the past couple of weeks and carpe the diem.

Besides, I can think no better way to facilitate the healing process than with some fresh air and some infectious grooves. The windows have been opened and the playlist has been finalized, arbitrary standards of quality be damned.

Catch you on the dance floor, cats and kittens -- this party is just beginning.

David Naughton - Makin' It (from a 1979 single; collected on Super Hits of the '70s: Vol. 24, 1996) - An American werewolf at the disco! This was actually the theme song to the identically titled and short-lived sitcom (starring Naughton) made to cash in on the Saturday Night Fever craze. The series tanked, but the song was a hit, coming in at #14 on the Billboard Top 100 songs for 1979 and even finding its way into Meatballs, the 1979 summer camp comedy film starring Bill Murray and Chris Makepeace.

Looking back, I kind of regret that I didn't use "I've got looks/I've got brains/and I'm breaking these chains" as my high school yearbook quote.

MiniVIP - Miss Augusta (from Let's Boogaloo: Vol. 3, 2006) - One of the contemporary numbers from the third -- and best -- volume of this excellent series of "lost" and retro-leaning soul, dance, and funk compliations, and it's an absolute stunner, with organ-driven hooks that catch hold of the listener and refuse to let go. (Not that any right-thinking person would want to escape its aural snare.)

Fatboy Slim - Ya Mama (from Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, 2000) - Not to be confused with "Yo-Yo Ma," though considering the Boston Symphony Orchestra's sad attempts to keep up with the trendiness curve (Ben Folds? Seriously?), I cannot rule out the eventual possibility of seeing a bunch of highbrow culture vultures tripping on E and waving glowsticks in time to a Norman Cook performance at Symphony Hall.

Shriekback - My Spine (Is the Bassline) (from a 1982 single; collected on Priests & Kanibals: Best of Shriekback, 1999) - At the present moment, it is my jaw that is pulsing out the beats and acting as my own internal rhythm section, but why quibble over details? Those peripheral axons lead to the same central trunk line, after all.

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.

they're all dancing to a drum machine

Every so often I'll hit upon a potential topic, only to find that it rapidly spirals into utter unwieldiness. Yesterday morning, I was lying awake in bed, looking at the ceiling and contemplating the sentential logic behind Rick Springfield's assertions that universally "we all need the human touch" and specifically Rick himself "needs the human touch," and how it all leads somehow to an art-directed and choreographed pop version of Beckett's Endgame, when I got the idea of doing a post focusing upon touch-related songs.

With a couple witty comments already forming in my head (including a requisite dig at Phil Collins and "Invisible Touch" that didn't turn out to be as witty as originally envisioned), I booted up the PC and ran some archive searches to appropriate songs that I might have missed while compiling my mental list. What I got back was enough material to create a double disc themed compilation. Being so spoiled for choice made the process of selection that much more difficult: Do I go for cheap and cheesy novelty? Or do I pick songs I actually like? For the briefest of moments, I considered making a theme week out of concept, but being a WASP by birth and New Englander by nature (I was born in North Carolina, but on occupied territory), such a focus on physical contact runs counter to my core ethos. (It's all about the personal space, kids!)

I was on the verge of shelving the whole idea when I finally stumbled upon a workable angle to address the tactile sensation that's sweeping the nation. Can you figure out what it is? (If you can't, I pity you, though you may have a bright future ahead of you as a Newsarama board commenter or Amazon.com user reviewer.)

Hugo Montenegro - Touch Me (from Moog Power, 1969) - Why go with The Doors' original version when there's a perfectly bizarre moogified cover version just waiting to be inflicted on the listening public? It's that kind of thinking (along with all the comics-themed posts and copious amounts of self-loathing) that sets me apart from other music bloggers. Granted the whole "Switched On" concept loses something when the song being reimagined is organ-heavy to start, but the stereophonic gimmickry and the Tom Jones-meets-Up With People vocals more than make up for it.

Samantha Fox - Touch Me (I Want Your Body) (from Touch Me, 1986) - I can't hear this song without thinking of my high school best friend, who had a largish framed poster of Ms. Fox on the wall of his bed room. He may have even been a fan of her music (though it was tangential to her appeal as a pop star). He also had a white leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and a feathered mullet. (No Pontiac Firebird, though.) Alas, our friendship did not stand the test of time, as other forces -- punk rock for me, live action role playing for him -- conspired to come between us.

Cathy Dennis - All Night Long (Touch Me) (from Move to This, 1990) - Before she embarked on a successful career of penning appealing (Kylie's "Can't Get You Out of My Head") and appalling (Britney's "Toxic") dance pop numbers for other performers, Cathy Dennis recorded a string of dance pop hits back in the early 1990's, which I've become rather fond of with the passing of years. Ah, the wonders of nostalgic dementia.

(I was surprised -- in a good way -- when my wife confessed that she was briefly into the dance pop scene back in the day, and bought a number of singles by Dennis, Neneh Cherry, and Technotronic during that brief interval between her first and current punk rock phases.)

Halloween Countdown: October 23 – her eyes were the color of insanity

Andrea was warned about what would happen if she decided to kick off her Sunday shoes. She foolishly ignored the advice of her parents and her pastor, and look what happened:

DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU.
RESIST SATAN'S CALL TO CUT FOOTLOOSE.
Bauhaus - St. Vitus Dance (from In the Flat Field, 1980) - Perfect for getting one's dyskinesiac groove on.

Flogging Molly - Devil's Dance Floor (from Swagger, 2000) - Not to be confused with this.

the great one is coming

Today would have been Jack “The King” Kirby’s 90th birthday. For an eloquent tribute to the man and his prodigious legacy as a comics creator one couldn’t do better than checking out Kevin Church’s essay on the subject. This being Armagideon Time, I’m just going to indulge in some autobiographical meanderings accompanied by half-formed thoughts and some music.

My first comics purchased as an active consumer (rather than handed down by adults) came from a stall at a flea market in Reading that my parents attended one Sunday each month. The dealer kept a small collection of high-value books under a glass case, but his bread and butter were a dozen long boxes of unsorted, unbagged comics sold for thirty-five cents a pop, or three for a buck. It was a veritable cornucopia of comics of all genres and stripes from the early to late 1970’s, with the occasional beat up Silver Age title or more recent (as in 1980-1982 “recent”) castoff thrown into the mix.

I was more concerned with characters and “cool-looking” covers than with the works of certain creators, though the range of the material meant that Jack Kirby’s stuff was pretty well represented. New Gods (and other “Fourth World” titles), The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, his bicentennial era run on Captain America were are present in abundance, and being a typical eight year old kid, I avoided them like the plague.

What can I say? It was a time when the detailed styles of John Byrne and George Perez were in ascendance, and charms of Kirby’s unique vision were lost on a child who hadn’t outgrown the notion that Wolverine was the coolest character ever. I was also fairly ignorant of comics history at the time, as well, and my first inklings of The King’s singular importance to Comics as We Know Them wouldn’t come until I picked up a cheap paperback reprint of the early Captain America stories which originally ran in Tales of Suspense during the 60’s. To young Andrew, Kirby’s stuff just seemed off-puttingly weird -- weird art, weird characters, and weird concepts that I was unable to appreciate in light of the then-contemporary standards of cool.

I didn’t stay young and stupid forever, however. The scales did eventually fall from my eyes, though the process took the better part of a decade. I grew to understand the pivotal role Kirby played in the history of the comics medium, even if I still puzzled over the Kirby-illustrated entries for his various DC creations in the original Who’s Who in the DC Universe directory. They seemed as if they belong to a world unto themselves, which in hindsight, they pretty much did. (With the exception of Kirby’s Fourth World mythos’ incorporation into the Legion of Super-Heroes’ “Great Darkness Saga” arc, his DC creations were never done justice by other creators, especially ones who claimed a special insight into his original vision.)

In the end, it was the camp factor that sealed the deal. The sheer oddness of Kirby’s dialogue (staccato beat poems of ellipses, dashes, and exclamation marks) and more bizarre concepts were repeatedly singled out for good-natured razzing in Kitchen Sink’s World’s Worst Comics Awards miniseries in the early 1990’s, and the WTF factor was too great to ignore. It was a time when my interest in comics was at its lowest ebb, but I was able to convince my more enthusiastic brother as my proxy. Something happened, though. We came for some cheap laughs, but instead went away with a deep sense of respect for the man’s work, but not necessarily for the reasons one might expect.

Now that the pendulum has swung completely the other way, and Jack Kirby has become a highly revered figure in comics enthusiast circles, I find myself wondering if idolatry has trumped nuanced appreciation. Kirby is most often cited as an “ideas man,” someone who was able to make manifest more high concepts in 22 pages than most creators do in an entire career, but I think to just point to Devil Dinosaur or Granny Goodness and say “Wow, that shit is insane! Woo!” is incredibly reductive. It’s true that Kirby had an unparalleled flair for ideas, but that alone isn’t what makes him important.

(That’s not discounting his contribution his artistic impact, which was immense. His innovations in layouts and composition were as radical and dynamic a quantum leap in the comics medium as the use of multiple camera angles and setups were to film, but that’s pretty much established knowledge at this point.)

The current of the zeitgeist runs pretty close to the surface for many of Kirby’s ideas, and it’s pretty easy to figure out the inspirational material for much of them. Future Shock begets OMAC and “The World That’s Coming.” Planet of the Apes begets Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. Popular science articles on genetics beget Cadmus and the DNAliens. Chariots of the Gods? leads to The Eternals. One of the later issues of his Fantastic Four run included a thinly veiled homage to The Prisoner. Of course, it’s not the inspiration but what one does with it, and Kirby had a knack for reimagination beyond recognition that eluded his peers and would be imitators, but the real thing that set him apart was his underlying idealism and faith that good will triumph.

For me, it’s best embodied by one of the core elements of Kirby’s Fourth World mythos. To seal a truce, the leaders of two factions of warring gods, one good and evil, agree to an exchange of sons. The child of the good leader, Scott Free (aka Mister Miracle), rises above the crushing despair of the hellworld orphanage to which he is sent off to, and manages to retain his fundamental sense of decency. The child of the evil leader, Orion, grows to embrace -- however tenuously -- the righteousness of those who have raised him. It’s the old nature versus nurture argument, but where all paths lead to redemption.

Sure, summarized in this manner it may sound a bit corny and overly simplistic, but in light of how goodness is currently presented in the superhero genre as an extended holding action against overwhelming evil, it’s both refreshing and uplifting to witness in action. In Kirby’s world, evil by its very nature is inevitably doomed to failure. All of Darkseid’s (the leader of the evil gods) plans are destined to come to naught because he cannot grasp the virtues of friendship, compassion, and noble sacrifice…

…and that’s worth a zillion Devil Dinosaurs or Paranex the Fighting Fetuses in my book. (Though I really, really do love Paranex the Fighting Fetus. Seriously, if I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be of the little guy.)

The Thompson Twins - King for a Day (from Here's to Future Days, 1985) - THEY ARE NOT TWINS!!! -- YET THEY COME -- COME FROM AN ISLAND ACROSS THE SEA -- TO DELIVER "POP MUSIC" FOR THE PURPOSE OF --- ENTERTAINMENT!!!!!


Another reason Jack Kirby will always be tops in my book is that he created the Forever People, a Fourth World title about a group of cosmic hippies. Even if he kind of flubbed the execution, the fact that a man of my grandparents’ generation was willing to present the youth counterculture in a sympathetic, non-caricatured manner not too long after the 1968 Democratic Convention and the Kent State shootings counts as nothing short of revolutionary.

Shamen - Phorever People (from Boss Drum, 1992) - I always imagined them as being more into aggressively mellow singer-songwriter stuff myself... (Actually, whenever I read the Forever People, the "Yay, Eden!" song from the space hippie episode of Star Trek loops in my head.)

Vacation: Day 4 - With Great Power...

My brother swung by the house on Sunday and dropped off a couple of boxes full of things he thought I might want: My copy of Bully for the PS2 and the Comics Journal Library: The Writers book I lent him, a Deathlok sticker card from 1976, two bags of Science Diet cat food (his cat has diabetes and is on a special diet now), and a bona fide Cosmic Cube he managed to acquire through his work.

While I was well and truly flattered that my younger sibling chose to entrust me with a device capable of reshaping reality at whim, I found myself at a loss regarding what what I exactly wanted to use it for. I pride myself on being something of an underachiever with few ambitions to complicate my easygoing way of life. Plus, I have read enough low-grade sci fi stories, seen enough episodes of The Twilight Zone, and am familiar enough with radical political movements to be wary about the Faustian pitfalls of limitless power.

The last thing I wanted to do was to wish for "world peace" and have a previously undetected asteroid trigger an extinction event, which is usually how this type of thing goes down.

So, with the Cube resting securely on my computer desk, I gazed upon its psychedelic swirl of Kirby crackles and composed a list of things I could possibly wish for. Here's what I came up with:

- a complete run of Captain Marvel Adventures in deluxe hardcover format
- a pristine set of SSP Smash Up Derby cars with all the parts and T-sticks
- a midnight blue 1970 Plymouth Barracuda that was immune to the New England elements
- an addition onto the house (two more bedrooms, a sun room, another full bath, and a computer room)
- that the Democrats would get their shit together and be an effective political force

Armed with this to-do list, I set out to make my (modest) dreams come through. Unfortunately, my brother failed to include a manual, or even a quick start guide for the device, and I was unable to accomplish anything except crash the Cube's OS and force a reboot. (Something about that last item on my list was to blame. Everytime I tried to make it happen, the Cube would lock up for a minute, then display the following message: Intractable Paradox Flaw has been detected in Planar Sector 000x3D3. Would you like to report this error? Irritating, but not surprising in the least...)

Figuring that I should scale back my ambitions until I had a better grasp of the learning curve, I attempted a more modest use of the Cube's abilities:

KRAK-A-BOOM!

"Not bad," indeed, especially considering how hard it has been lately to set up an appointment with my usual hair stylist. The sudden transition from night to day and the transfomation of my Revolutionary Ireland t-shirt into a Polysics one were a little jarring, but minor side effects are to be expected when one dabbles in warping the very fabric of reality. (Maura has grown quite fond of the tribe of telepathic pygmy brontosaurians I accidentally summoned while attempting to will a can of Dr. Pepper from the fridge to the living room endtable...)

Snap! - The Power (from World Power, 1990) - OK, so it's just a polished cube of plexiglass that my brother thought I'd get a kick out of having. The only power it possesses is the ability to inspire today's exceptionally nerdy and goofy post.

The Horrorpops - Kool Flattop (from Hell Yeah!, 2004) - My preference for buzzcut and flattop hairstyles is rooted in both a residual sense of punk rockitude and my traumatic memories of a childhood spent sporting a John Denver 'do.

(Thanks to Dave Lartigue, for providing the Barber of Worlds image, and to Chris Sims, who made with the Kirby crackles and inspiration.)

says his friends, the poets and the artists

Here's a little something to tide you over while I contemplate my next few steps on the road to damnation:

The song is "Journey Agent" by the Australian electronica/dance outfit Pnau, and I fell in love with its snazzy, jazzy retro groove from the moment I first heard the track. (Thanks, Zartan.)

That reminds me -- I really need to get back to that retro-spy-tronica mix CD I started assembling a few month's back. My life is a series of unfinished projects.

Pnau - Journey Agent (from Sambanova, 2000)