nothing you can touch

Find a gap in the market and fill it, preferably in a more efficient manner than your competitors can manage.

That axiom might seem straightforward enough, but it can be highly problematic when applied to industrial capitalism's economies of scale. While you might make terrific profits upon unleashing a new must-have commodity, there comes a point where sales stagnate in the face of market saturation, and demand based on consumption and attrition falls well short of your corporate target.

If you have a stove in your home, you're not going to buy another unless it stops working somewhere down the line. Perfectly logical....until you consider that economy is driven by consumption, or more accurately the assumption of ever-escalating rates of consumption. Zero sum is a heretical concept and plateaus are where the losers go to die from falling share prices.

This is why there is such a thing as marketing. Not marketing in the simple sense of letting potential customers know what you're offering and where to obtain it, but marketing in the high-powered, arm-twisting sense of creating urgent demands where they wouldn't otherwise exist. There are many tools in the overarching arsenal -- such planned obsolescence (which has worked so well for the automotive industry and -- hahahaha -- BluRay), presenting minor tweaks as essential features (Hello, consumer electronics biz!), and broadening the perceived functionality of a product in a way that will convince folks to buy even more of it.

That last one is an especially favored tactic of the fine folks in the food industry. These purveyors of processed palate pleasers have never passed up a chance to turn an iffy medical study into a full court "this shit essential for your health" press or an opportunity to present some product-intensive nightmare as the cutting edge of suburban ranch home cuisine...

...which brings us to this ad from the late 1970's:

Yep, that's right. Miracle Whip Popsicles.

I am a man who likes his mayonnaise (with which Miracle Whip has a tenuous and contentious familial relationship). That mix of egg white, oil, and vinegar adds just the right tangy zing to a chicken or turkey sandwich, and when I was a wee lad, my favorite snack was mayo smeared on a slice of Wonder Bread. (Don't judge until you've walked a mile in my boots, 'kay?) I also know people who use mayo or Miracle Whip in less orthodox culinary ways, like as a dessert garnish.

That said, I can't imagine what it would be like to snack on a frozen block of mayo substitute crammed with frozen strawberries and mini marshmallows. I definitely do not want to imagine how such an unintuitive concoction would handle the long (or maybe not so long) trip through one's gastrointestinal tract.

I want to assume the strawberries would mellow the oil-vinegar melange, but given that someone thought that faux mayo-sicles would appeal to the masses, I can't assume anything. To paraphrase Bruno Bettelheim, "the cultural history of the 1970's is a nightmare from which we have just begun to awaken."

Psychedelic Furs - Pretty in Pink (from Talk Talk Talk, 1981) - The 80's, however, were pretty cool once you got past the rise of Big Conservatism and the constant fear of nuclear armageddon. The music was certainly better, at least during the first half of the decade.

(Note: I must confess a certain nervousness about composing today's post, as there is evidence that making fun of misguided foodstuffs from previous decades can turn a person into an unfunny, self-righteous, batshit foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing ideologue. I'm trusting that you, my dear readers, will hold an intervention should I start to succumb to that malady.)

night turns to day

Election 2008 -- this time it's personal.

It's not about validating a flawed system of governance or overreaching hopes for meaningful change or some lingering vestiges of patriotic idealism.

It's about spite, an opportunity to flip the bird at the sanctioned looters and their legion of sanctimonious thugs which have run roughshod over everything that is sane and decent for the last eight years.

That's more than enough for me.

A Popular History of Signs - Land of the Free (from Comrades, 1984) - I suppose I could have went with Arcadia again, but why settle for post-Duran leavings when this New Order-y slice of obscure synthpop will suffice?

A final note to my readers in the Golden State: You are voting "no" on Proposition 8, right?

Halloween Countdown: October 8 - never can resist him

Behold, the TERRIFYING VISAGE of COUNT DRACULA!

There are several reasons why the early 1950's are considered to be the golden age of horror comics, but Eerie Comics #12 (August 1953) isn't one of them.

....and since I've already dirtied my hands rummaging through the pauper's grave of popcult obscurities in search of suitable material, I might as well toss this curious specimen in your general direction:

Toto Coelo - Dracula's Tango (from a 1982 single; collected on I Eat Cannibals & Other Tasty Trax, 1996) - Moving from flesh-eating to blood-drinking over the course of a few months -- you don't see that kind of creative growth in today's musical acts.

(In case you were wondering, "Toto Coelo" is the original name of the new wave girl group. They were rechristened "Total Coelo" for American releases, lest the unwashed masses confuse them with the "Rosanna" guys. Give me dance pop goofiness over soporific soft rock any day.)

(Note: In today's installment of pronounced WOO-BIN, I beat on a countercultural legend.)

Halloween Countdown: October 2 - Mockingbird Lane Blacktop

And so we turn to the age-old question, The Munsters or The Addams Family?

Don't worry, there isn't a wrong answer, just a matter of personal preference.

Both shows were blessed with outstanding casts, but Gomez, Morticia, and company will always hold the place of higher affection in my heart, as the unselfconscious eccentricity of the Addams clan makes for better entertainment in my book. The Munsters, on the other hand, came off as a by-the-numbers family sitcom given a Universal monster makeover. The Munsters hewed close to suburban norms. The Addams Family never managed to realize that they were living outside the mainstream, and wore their freakiness on their sleeves.

(It reminds me a lot of my own blue collar bohemian childhood, which is the likely explanation of my pro-Addams Family bias. There were fewer model train explosions and more shouting in my version, though, and my uncle was less into putting lightbulbs in his mouth as he was into using hand puppets to obscenely proposition stewardresses.)

The one area where The Munsters possessed unquestionable superiority was the theme song arena. As iconic as the snap-accented Addams Family jingle is, it doesn't hold a red wax candle to the crypt-surf instrumental that kicked off the start of each new episode....as well as providing inspiration to generations of deathrockers and horrorpunks to come.

roll for critical fumble

When I was stuck at my grandma's house a couple weeks back, I unearthed my well-worn copy of the 4th edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide. It was published in 1991, just before the alternative rock scene went mainstream. In those days before information on obscure indie and punk bands was a mere Google search away, the Guide was an invaluable resource when it came to deciding which albums and artists to keep an eye out for at the local record shops.

There was a time (back when I rode the Christian Herter scholarship gravy train) when my mornings were spent copying out promising leads from the Guide onto index cards and my afternoons were spent wandering from one used vinyl store to another in search of the objects of ephemeral desire. As a result, my copy of the guide is, how you say, "beat to shit," missing its cover, its spine bent into a c-shape, and the pages stuffed with clippings and photos of interest to me at the time.

Eventually I migrated to The Guinness Who's Who of Indie and New Wave Music and a number of microgenre directories as my sourcebooks of choice, as they better matched my specific musical interests and covered artists not included in Trouser Press. The fact that the writing in those other directories was a little more even-handed was also played an important factor, because as handy as Trouser Press was for determining release dates and album titles, the commentary and capsule reviews in the book frequently reached toxic levels of "jaded hipster" and "rockist" attitude.

Certain bands were especially singled out for critical maulings in which informational content took a back seat to self-satisfied rants permeated with the phony idolatry of rockist mythology, where the mythic (and false) aura of authenticity is all that matters. I noticed it back in 1993, but it was even more obnoxious to revisit fifteen years later, as my tastes have shifted and broadened and I've gained a bit more knowledge about the artists, the ideologies, and the music involved.

It's all very silly and pointless. What you may claim to be the pinnacle of pop genius, I might find to be kind of pedestrian, and vice-versa. Our individual tastes are our own, and that's nothing to be ashamed about...unless you are a Katy Perry fan, in which case I hope the Fates are kinder to you in your next incarnation. Savaging INXS for not being Elvis Costello might make for some unintentional laughs, but it's also quite pathetic. (Besides. I'd rather listen to Kick than Armed Forces any day of the week.)

Here are some excerpts from some of the more egregious rockist rants from my copy of the Trouser Press Guide, deliberately chosen with certain readers of this blog in mind.

Orange Juice:

Glasgow's insufferably coy Orange Juice, de facto leaders of the Scottish neo-pop revolution, typified a UK trend towards clean, innocent looks that unfortunately spilled over into the music.

Orange Juice - Falling and Laughing (from You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, 1982) - It's true. MTV and Smash Hits ruined everything. God forbid that someone who knows how to tune a guitar and doesn't look like a refugee from a Bowery methadone clinic becomes a chart success.

Oingo Boingo:

This eight-piece LA outfit (with three-man horn section) started out trying to be a West Coast answer to XTC and Devo, but suffered from studied wackiness/quirkiness and managed to hide solid cleverness behind overproduction and hamminess.

Oingo Boingo - Wild Sex (in the Working Class) (from Nothing to Fear, 1982) - Wow. That's reading an awful lot into what I always thought of as pretty entertaining party music.

Conflict:

In the real/rock world, only the young and the gullible expect their favorite bands to abide by lofty personal standards.

Conflict - The Guilt & The Glory (from It's Time to See Who's Who, 1983) - I don't entirely disagree with the above statement (in an otherwise positive write-up) about the stalwart anarchopunk outfit, except that the "real/rock" part makes me want to punch somebody and for the fact that Minor Threat, the most generic-sounding hardcore band ever, was praised for wearing their hearts on their sleeves in their Guide entry.

Pet Shop Boys:

The in-joke references and self-amused esoterica strewn thoughout songs like "West End Girls" and "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" should have precluded their general popularity, but evidently the laxative-smooth synth backing has utilitarian value for clubgoers. Ghastly, depressing and offensive.

Pet Shop Boys - Suburbia (from Please, 1986) - Pop sensibility and synthesizers are anathema to rockists....until some cherished rock idol appropriates them for his own use, at which point there's only a 50% chance the purists will howl for his blood.

--------------------

In other news, there's a new post up at pronounced WOO-BIN on the subject of local geography.

expanding locally

My media micronation expanded today with the launch of pronounced WOO-BIN, a blog created to bring the majesty of the Boston accent to the starving masses.

So if you're morbidly curious or just want to put a voice behind my words, check it out.

Or don't. I'm not pushy.

In any case, I'm commemorating the event with this track, in which Boston's neurotic new wave legends do their take on a 1966 Detroit soul classic by The Capitols...

Human Sexual Response - Cool Jerk (from Fig. 15, 1980) - Not bad. Not bad at all.

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.

like the feeling at the end of the page

My wife and her friend were browsing the stacks at the local chain bookstore when they came across this fine work of high literature...


I realize that there is a detailed science behind romance novel cover design. In a genre based on disposability and formula, marketing is everything and the ideal state exists between comfortable familiarity and enticing difference. Call it the "impulse purchase zone."

The intent behind the cover to Midnight Treats is fairly obvious -- the promise of softcore titillation. The couple posed in a way that the focus is on the man, whose focus in turn on the potential buyer...not his partner in monkey-lovin'. "I'm really thinking of you, not this hot blonde I'm spooning," his expression suggests. Or perhaps, "This hot blonde could totally be you."

Intent is not the same as execution, however, and Maura and her pal saw things through the filter of a Medford, Massachusetts upbringing...


For full effect, it really needs to be read in a Medford accent, which is a testosterone-heavy variant of the Boston accent with Vinne Barbarino tossed in for good measure, and delivered with a slight nod of the head. You can take a girl out of Meffa, but you can't take Meffa out of a girl.

(That comment could very well get me killed once the wife reads it. She insists that the whole "Meffa" thing was a joke constructed in neighboring communities, and that no one in Medford calls it "Meffa," despite ample evidence to the contrary. I can't be too hard on her, though. It's not her fault she didn't grow up in the green fields and wastepits of Woobin, as your humble author did.)

Missing Persons - Words (from Spring Session M, 1982) - An excellent slice of American new wave, featuring the talents (and distinct Medford accent) of singer Dale Bozzio.

like someone shit under a pine tree

"Yes, I detect the distinct aroma of a chemical engineer's approximation of wildflowers...or a burning whitewall tire."
Celebrate the natural while embracing the artificial -- just one of the litany of paradoxes collectively known as "the 1970s." From the simulated wood-grain paneling used to convey an informal "rustic" touch in a split-level ranch home, to the earth-toned (or Mardras and other "old-timey" and nativesque print) polyester fashions, to the plethora of dubiously "natural" aromas hatched in labs and unleashed by a host of household vectors -- there is no shortage of examples illustrating that era's conflicting impulses.

Without discounting how much of this phenomenon was driven from the top down ("Ladies Home Journal says avacado and floral prints are in this year!"), underlying the co-optive marketing trend was a certain degree of ecological awareness filtered through the era's omnipresent accent of self-actualization. Both were holdovers from sixties counterculture ideology that managed to embed themselves in the public consciousness where radical politics and other militant alternatives to the satus quo had failed.

Though the naturalist impulse survived and thrived well into the Me Decade, it mutated into a less virulent strain, as an itch upon the conscience, rather than a pain. As such, it was something that could be easily be salved without resorting to solar powered bunkers made from soda bottles or drastically changing one's habits. Satisfaction of conscience without sacrifices in consumption or comfort was attainable, and even if the means contradicted the ends or the net impact ran into the loss column, it was good enough for most folks. (For a modern example, look at how liberally the terms "green" and "organic" are tossed around by marketers...or just take a quick stroll through any Whole Foods store.)

If I had to choose one aroma that symbolizes the 1970s for me, I'd have to go with the strawberry-scented tree-shaped air fresheners. "Strawberry" is a bit misleading, actually, as the actual scent and flavor of fresh strawberries, like cold fusion, is something that science has yet to sucessfully create under laboratory conditions. They can create a reasonable facsimile of lemon, a passable banana, but when it comes to strawberry, the best they've been able to accomplish is a random guess based on incomplete third-hand accounts.

(Disturbingly enough, when someone describes something as smelling or tasting of strawberries, in nearly every case they mean the artificial version and not the real thing....which applies to a lot of other aromas and flavors as well. Over time, the baseline has been shifted so that the imperfect facsimile has become the definitive standard.)

Cloying, sickly sweet, and as obnoxious as what it proposes to mask, those ubiquitous dashboard fixtures perfectly symbolize the era for me, right down to the iconic evergreen shape that, like the scented oils embedded within, evokes a sense of naturalism fundamentally at odds with its actual origins.

Young Fresh Fellows - Fruitbasket Blues (from Beans and Tolerance, 1989) - No artificial colors, no artificial flavors -- just some hard-to-find, 100% organic Seattle-grown indie rock.

The Buggles - Living in the Plastic Age (from Age of Plastic, 1980) - Everything fake is real again.

fashions by Darwin

Today we're going to take a look at the prevailing biological fashions, circa 430 million years ago. The Ordovician-Silurian extinction event cleared the way for all sorts of wild and crazy adaptive styles which make excellent mockery material from our lofty present-day perspective with its pre-distressed skinny jeans, low-rise sweatpants, and ironic t-shirts.

It's great being a superior lifeform, isn't it?

Hey, look! It's a giant sea scorpion! Talk about overcompensation! This dude will rock you like a hurricane! (Trite popcult references make the blogosphere go 'round!)

Trilobites were hot stuff for a time, but so were pogs. Seriously. The three-lobed look with a segmented thorax? What intelligent designer came up with that idea?

Nice look, dude. Is it anime cosplay season already? This pioneer of piscine fashion is rather proud of his status as a vertebrae early-adopter. Too bad he can't tell if he wants to be a fish or a horseshoe crab. Sheesh, didn't they have Urban Outfitters stores in the Paleozoic Era?

This dashing pair of cephalaspis are sporting the "bone-plated jawless" look popular with the Silurian-Devonian fishy crowd. So what if it was a reflection of environment and evolutionary trends? The important thing is that it looks really goofy by current bio-aesthetic standards and is perfectly suited for facile snarkery.

These Silurian fashions make it really hard to tell the males and females of the various species apart, which makes me wonder what other kinds of "boning" was going on behind the secluded coral reefs. HAW HAW! (Remember, kids: It's not a real half-assed retro fashion post if it doesn't contain at least one casual or thinly-veiled homophobic joke.)

If I have seen further than others, it is because I am standing on my tippity-toes, peeking over the shoulders of clueless giants.

We've got another original version/cover version pairing today -- a double shot of new (and newer) wave pop from the City of Angels, where star-fucking is always in vogue. (Not that I'm making a statement by choosing this particular tune or anything, honest....)

Felony - The Fanatic (from The Fanatic, 1983)

The Checkers - The Fanatic (from Make a Move, 2003)

Schrödinger's landscape

Cambridge Road, Burlington MA, circa 1949
My maternal grandmother grew up in Woburn's west side, three steps from the Burlington line. Her father and grandfather worked at Cummings Farm, long since bulldozed and obliterated to make room for the shopping centers, condo complexes, and office parks that occupy the crowded stretch of Cambridge Road (and it will always be "road," not "street" for me) from Bedford Road to Route 128.

Traces of the Cummings estate still remain, as the bulk of Mrs. Cummings's substantial land holdings were bequeathed to the "children of the City of Boston" in a restrictive trust which eminent domain takings have only taken a small bite out of. Every so often there has been talk by Boston politicians to find a loophole to break the trust and sell the prime real estate, thus securing a huge windfall to fund projects like the Rose Kennedy Greenway or a 1:1 scale replica of the Sphinx -- bearing Tom Menino's face -- to be built on the South Boston waterfront that is Mayor Mushmouth's personal Valley of the Kings.

For now, though, the patches of forest and scrub between the office buildings and used car lots remain overgrown and beyond the reach of deep-pocketed developers. Every time I drive up that way with my grandmother, which is more times than I can count, she delivers the same series of nostalgic rambles about what the area used to be like when she was young.

"We used to race paper boats in that drainage ditch. My uncle drowned in that stream when he was trying out his new galoshes. He was six. I used to babysit for people up this hill. It seemed so steep back then. You could wander wherever, and no one would tell you to get off their land..."

The litany never varied, and became etched in my brother's head and mine through years of repetition. Even when I drive the stretch alone the routine of places and events queues up unbidden, a subconscious mantra and stuff of which family in-jokes are made.

On the way back from our weekly trips to Target, I'll occasionally take a detour through my old North Woburn stomping grounds, though it has become harder and harder to reconcile the visual input with the expectations of decades-old memories. The phantoms retain more substance than the present reality, and I still see the Tomato Hill sandpit or the seasonal marsh/skating pond in the woods in place of the subdivisions that now occupy those spaces.

From my late childhood through my mid-twenties, the pace of development in the area was glacial -- a single-family home here and office building there, but apart from the last lurching encroachments from the local industrial park, there was little in the way of rapid, drastic transformations of the landscape. What did occur was gradual enough to be easily internalized and placed in context. This not only applied to Woburn and its surrounding communities, but to the places in town where I used to spend my time -- Brighton Ave to Kenmore Square, Mass Ave from the MIT Bridge to Porter Square, Cambridgeport to Central Square, Porter Square to Davis.

Then came the real estate boom and tsunami of gentrification that came in wake of rent control being repealed in Cambridge. I also got a car and started driving again, which shifted my axis of operations away from the city and back to the suburbs. I work in Boston, but what I actually see of the city is mostly limited to a stretch of Morrissey Boulevard and the view from I-93. It's no great loss, to tell the truth. In this era of retail chains and global branding, the only difference between city and suburb is that the suburbs have better parking and slightly smaller chance of stepping in a puddle of human urine.

When I do make the rare trip into town, I find a landscape transformed beyond recognition, to the point (as in the time I met up with a friend in Davis Square) where I lose my bearings in places I've walked through dozens of times before. I can deal with the new well enough, but I've yet to encounter an instance of the "new" being an improvement rather than a bland upscale repurposing.

The nature of the changes filters back to me from my wife or from urbanocentric friends. Kenmore Square has been effectively eradicated. Allston has slowly been absorbed into the fiefdoms of Boston University and Harvard. Harvard Square has turned into a strip mall with pretensions of atmosphere and Central Square has gone from the home of radical bookstores and Cheapo Records to hosting The Gap.

There's no real reason to go back anymore, and I prefer to preserve my mental image of the landscape (including the stop sign in Kendall Square my pal Leech walked straight into in a golden moment of unintended slapstick) as it was back in 1994 in a dead/not dead state immune to the quantum flucutations of empirical evidence.

It does make me an unreliable source of driving directions, however.

Duran Duran - Careless Memories (from Duran Duran, 1981) - Infinitely preferable to "Careless Whispers."

Saint Etienne - It's All Gone Horribly Wrong (from The Misadventures of Saint Etienne, 1999) - A Japanese soundtrack album to an English film released only in Spain and which starred an American actress (Parker Posey, as per the Mandatory Posey Appearance Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994).

Svensk - Getting Old (from a 1967 single) - Psychedelic freakbeat is immune to the ravages of time.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality (from Architecture & Morality, 1981) - Brutalism is maladaptive.

Vacation 2008: Day 4 - The orders are in

(from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! v1 #2, collected in this handy forthcoming omnibus)
The life of a retrologist may be spiritually rewarding, but it doesn't really pay well...or pay at all, actually. To meet my many and varied financial obligations, as well as to support my useless crap habit, I also work as a flagman for data streams at a public university.

It's a perfect job in many ways. It's unionized, pays well, and is generally low stress -- barring the occasional meltdown on the IT end of things. The only catch is that while the flow of work may slacken at off peak times, it never stops and will start to clog things up for the rest of the office without my semi-expert guidance.

This is why I'm getting ready to make the hectic commute into Dorchester to pull a half-shift during the middle of my vacation. I'm hoping by going in late and leaving early I can avoid the usual traffic hassles on I-93....which is a lot like hoping that I'll find a strongbox full of Confederate gold buried underneath the azalea bushes next to my patio.

Black Flag - Clocked In (from The First Four Years, 1984) - It's always time for classic L.A. hardcore.

Wall of Voodoo - Back in Flesh (from Dark Continent, 1981) - The anthem for Generation Avoidance, to be sullenly muttered under one's breath during the long walk from parking lot to cubicle.

a grave condition

Dr. West's Magical Revivification Formula^TM! Another fine product from the Romero Corporation, a Skeletal Family Company!

(Side effects may include a shambling gait, a slight rotting aroma, and an irrational craving for the flesh of the living. Should your skin split and slough off of your wet, gleaming skull, discontinue use immediately.)

Given the known limitations of the four-color printing process on cheap newsprint, perhaps photographic testimonals weren't the wisest method of marketing a skin care product, especially when the rictus-grinning models looked like they just stepped in from a community theater production of Carnival of Souls.

Zombina and The Skeletones - Nobody Likes You (When You're Dead) (from Taste the Blood of Zombina and The Skeletones, 2002) - Well, nobody that you would necessarily want to like you, that is.

Thirteen at Midnight - Skin Deep (from a 1983 single) - The Not-Quite-Human League.

energy can be directed

Such as whether or not Mr. T really did eat your balls.
"Good enough" really is good enough for me most of the time. I am a man of simple tastes and few ambitions. Any penalties that my lack of competitive drive have incurred have been more than ameliorated by my sense of laid-back equanimity. It's when events disrupt my comfortable state of deliberate equilibrium that I get, well, whiny.

I was fine with the speed and performance of my current DSL service. It's easy to install and maintain, and hotswitching the router between PC and the Xbox can be done in a couple of minutes. Despite marketing propaganda's push to shame me as a narrow bandwith luddite, I've never been one to measure the size of my manhood in Mbps. The "bigger, badder, faster" mindset leads to things like Hummers, McMansions, and eventually total environmental and economic collapse.

For years I've been resisting the dinner-and-showertime robocalls from my ISP urging, nay browbeating, my wife and I to upgrade to FIOS. I didn't trust the pricing of the service, regardless of the front end deals offered. I had no desire to let some stanger into my house to screw around with the wiring. Most importantly, I definitely didn't want said stranger to fuck around with my carefully maintained computer and/or uploading company junkware onto it as part of some "special package."

Yet that's exactly what's going to happen tomorrow morning. Yeah, I know -- "Poor, poor Andrew having to suffer through the horror of having super high-speed internet service installed." It's still a pain in the ass, though, as I have to spend most of my day clearing space and cleaning the monumental clutter that has accumulated around my workstation over the past few years in order to give a person or persons unknown free access to my secret lair.

The Kings - Switchin' to Glide (from The Kings Are Here, 1980) - Does not include new wave installation surcharge, hooky parts and labor, or any applicable local taxes on synth usage.

Clarence Reid - If It Was Good Enough for Daddy (from Running Water, 1973) - Bring on the punch cards, rotary phones, and heavy-ass funk!

(If there's no post tomorrow, just assume something went catastrophically wrong.)

got your name, got your number

Like, those graphics are totally trippindicular!
It's 1983, and the home videogame industry is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. The mad rush to cash in on the videogame craze has led to a market saturated beyond sustainability with substandard product. The bargain bins of Heartland Drug (oh, how I miss that place) are groaning under the weight of hundreds of unsold cartridges priced at a deep discount.

So how did C.B.S. Electronics choose to differentiate Solar Fox, its adequate port of an unremarkable 1981 coin-op title, from the rest of the hastily programmed contenders for the weary consumer's dollar?

By attempting to ride the coattails of an ephemeral popcult phenomenon engendered by a hit novelty song by Frank (and Moon) Zappa, of course...


Solar Fox: The TV Commercial
Solar Fox: The Comic Book Version
(clicking makes it even more bitchin', like totally)
Is the comic book ad an expanded "director's cut" of the television commercial? Or is it akin to one of those novelizations where the professional fan-ficcer author takes liberties with the source material? ("Chewie put a soft paw on Han's shoulder and gazed longingly into his roguish eyes...")

Unfortunately for C.B.S. Electronics, their tantalizing promise of "valley girl in outer space" action was sadly undercut by the utter lack of such within the actual game, and the "excitement" did end abruptly in 1984, when the company, along with most of the other cartridge mills, fell victim to the market implosion they helped bring about.

I was fairly oblivious to the great videogame crash of 1983-84 while it was unfolding, except as a beneficiary to the flood of Atari 2600 games marked down within purchasing reach of an eleven year old with a $10 weekly allowance. At $4.99 a pop, it was easy to build up a substantial library of cartridges. Even if most of the games were utter shit, one of the benefits of being a kid is that one's critical faculties tend to be rather lacking, which meant that even something like Space Jockey (hastily slapped together by the gaming wizards at Quaker Oats) could hold my attention for hours.

(Most of us grow out of such bottomfeeding habits as we get older. The ones that don't tend to be found in places like the scans_daily Livejournal community or the Newsarama forums.)

Occasionally I reget not holding on to my collection of 2600 cartridges, which was scattered to the winds in the great upheval after my mother passed away, but the feeling fades quickly after I revisit some of the more interesting titles via emulation software. Even the most dedicated retrologist is occasionally forced to admit that some things really are better left in the past.

Yeah, given the focus of today's post, I trust you're all probably expecting me to post "Valley Girl" by Frank and Moon Unit Zappa. The truth is that I'm not all that fond of the song, which I find more irritating than anything. Instead we've got the breezy new wave pop theme from 1983 Zappa-free film Valley Girl, which is my wife's default viewing choice when there's nothing else worth watching on cable...

Bonnie Hayes with the Wild Combo - Girls Like Me (from Good Clean Fun, 1982)

...and a sparkling synthpop obscurity...

Circuit 7 - Video Boys (from a 1984 single)

your chariot of the gods awaits

The Chihuahua Men of Sirius-7 walk among us! (At least the caption writer had the integrity to make appropriate use of quotation marks.)

It's one of the oldest tricks in the Handbook of Lazy Journalism: Take a current hot trend or media property, find a way to tie it back to some tangentially-related wire story, and from there stitch together a Frankenstein's monster consisting of equal parts press release and "news of the weird" item:

Joe Q. Jackson's skin has a pronounced greenish hue -- not because of gamma radiation, but because he has a rare skin disease. Few sufferers of the excruciatingly painful disease live past the age of thirty, but analysts are expecting Universal's The Incredible Hulk to break box office records when it premieres this Friday!

I know. I missed my true calling in life, but I take comfort in the fact that when I go to sleep each night, I do so free of the shame of trying to use war orphans and progeria victims to promote Sex in the City or the latest biblioturd squeezed out by Dan Brown.

If one were to take the tried and true formula outlined above and apply it to the slow-pitch softball arena of tweener mags at a time when the collective popcult consciousness was hyper-saturated with all things paranormal, the results would most likely resemble "Space: The Final Frontier" from the April 1978 of Pizzazz Magazine.

The article is a undercooked shepherd's pie of science fact, pseudo-scientific braggadocio, and a host of facile sci-fi references designed to kickstart the atrophy of the younger crowd's critical faculties, thus preparing them for the coming Reagan years and beyond...

(I've been referred to as "the Lysenko of retrologists.")

Dr. Hynek, whose twin careers of astronomer and "ufologist" can best be described as a long quest to have one's cake and eat it too, is absolutely right. It is far easier for me to imagine having my mind blown by some childlike alien Moog-and-laser-show enthusiasts than it is for me to imagine living under a militant imperial regime built on the ashes of a great republic.

In the year 2000, you will commute to work in your own personal Death Star! (Until the Alderaan branch office gets draconically downsized, that is.)

The musical portion of today's program is the stuff that myths are made of...

"There came a time when the Old Rock Gods died! The prog set died with the boogie rockers! The coked-out corporate behemoths perished, locked in battle with the flowers of anarchy unleashed! It was the last days for them! An ancient era was passing to the polyphonic waves of synthesized sound! Thus the New Wave of Gods were born!"

Nina Hagen - Gods of Aquarius (from ...in Ekstase, 1985)

Tubeway Army - Praying to the Aliens (from Replicas, 1979)

the evidence is strong

Mr. Spooky, looking for paths to cross.
Luck. It can pushed, pressed, and tried. It can be prayed for, hoped against, and trusted upon.

Ultimately, when we speak of luck, both good and ill, what we're really discussing is an after-the-fact assessment of the laws of probability. They can no more be negotiated with (through ritual, fetish, or prayer) than any other impartial force of nature...

...despite what the desperate throng of supplicants who've made the pilgrimage to Keno Mart's lottery kiosk would otherwise believe. Hope may spring eternal, but that's only because the soil of self-delusion is perpertually fertile.

Lene Lovich - Lucky Number (from Stateless, 1978) - An examination of love as a binary system.

(I briefly considered posting "13 Is My Lucky Number" by L.A. shock-punks The Child Molesters, but there are some things even I won't stoop to.)

they got the talk

Sgt. Nick Fury reminisces about some of the women he and his unit of goldbricks have crossed paths with:

(from Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos Annual #5, 1969)
Yep, Sophia Loren once fought alongside the Howling Commandos. Truly a pivotal moment in the history of fan-fiction.

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but in the cases of Carla and Dr. Reiker it's hard for me not to overlook the fact that at the time this comic was published, it was a commonly held belief on the right wing of the political spectrum that the both the civil rights and anti-war movements were run by communist dupes.

Then again, we are talking about crazy mixed up dames, right, fellas?

Rodgers & Hammerstein - There Is Nothin' Like a Dame (from South Pacific: An Original Soundtrack Recording, 1958) - Eliminate all other possibilites, and the one which remains must necessarily be a dame.

Graham Parker - Local Girls (from Squeezing Out Sparks, 1979) - A shining example of the "Cranky Not-Really-That-Young Man" school of new wave.

here we are stranded

Doll Man lives in a little universe all his own.
After missing work on Friday (because I hate working Commencement) and Monday (because we had to make an emergency vet visit for Fergus the rabbit), I returned to the office on Tuesday to a whopping backlog of work (because the database waits for no man or sick bunny). A couple of my co-workers were out sick, the reason being that one of them chose to stay on the job most of Monday despite having a ferocious illness. Germs being the restless little busybodies that they are, the illness leapfrogged though the maze of cubicles to offer Grandfather Nurgle's benediction (Andrew = nerd) to most of the other people in my department.

"Watch out," I was told, but I figured I'd be fine since the primary vectors weren't around to spread the infectious joy.

So imagine my glee this morning when I woke up out of a sound sleep to discover that some playful pixies had run a power sander along the tender flesh between my sinuses and my trachea, and had also replaced the lymph nodes on both sides of my lower jaw with PGA-certified golf balls.

Yes, it has been one fuck of a week so far, though I did manage to score a much coveted LP from eBay this morning which will be featured in an upcoming post that could very well cement my reputation as the antichrist of Boston-based music bloggers. In other good news, Maura and the good folks from the Woburn Feral Cat Coalition managed to round up Tess's orphaned kittens (as well as a litter of Pepi's, which was a surprise that shouldn't have been) last night.

I'm still trying to figure out why Maura, who went gallavanting around in the rain and cold, and had more social contact with the folks in our office, dodged the sickness bullet while I, the cubicular hermit who spent the evening playing videogames, took it right between the eyes. Maybe there is something to that vegetarian business she's always going on about, after all.

Japan - Quiet Life (from Quiet Life, 1979) - "Hi, we're Duran Duran, and we were wondering if we could borrow a pint of your sound and a couple slices of your image? Thanks!"

visual synergy: the revolution will be synthesized

This Korg Poly-61 kills fascists! New wavers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your oversized shoulder pads!



Re-Flex - The Politics of Dancing (from The Politics of Dancing, 1983) - Are you now doing, or have you ever done, the hokey-pokey? I have in my hand a list of 57 highly-placed individuals who have put their left feet in and shaken them all about.



Duran Duran - New Moon on Monday (from Seven and the Ragged Tiger, 1983) - So the moral of the video is that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring in late 1960's Czechoslovakia would have succeeded if the pro-democracy forces had access to Simon Le Bon's pouty lips and Nick Rhodes's groovy hair?*

*Providing that the counterrevolutionary forces were armed with neon vibrators and not Kalashnikovs and Soviet tanks, of course.