and kept my mind from wandering

I’m not sure what to make of this announcement. As a studio album, it would have been the pinnacle of conceited folly, but as a radio special, it’s a matter of fatuous inevitability. What has been revealed of the line up so far doesn’t instill me with a lot of confidence, just the anticipation that the end results will be overly reverent takes garnished with a side of ego tripping. (Travis’ major claim to fame, at least as far as I’ve seen referenced outside the rarified realm of the music press, was their mimeographed copy of “Getting Better” that was used in a Phillips commercial.)

If the producers really wanted to pay homage to the legacy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they should have gone wild when selecting the artists. For example, I’d love to hear Neko Case’s take on “A Day in the Life,” or have Underworld or the Chemical Brothers rework George Harrison’s self-indulgent boat anchor “Within You Without You” into something spectacular and different.

This sentence:

The BBC reports that Geoff Emerick, the engineer in charge of the original sessions, will use the same equipment to record the new versions.

…is a fine example of how gimmickry passes as relevance these days. It’s a level of hucksterism on par with a carnival barker’s patter (“The Great Wheredini will now attempt to escape from the same guillotine used to decapitate Marie Antoinette!”) or the sales pitch of Chaucer’s Pardoner when hawking his phony relics. (Speaking of which, who knew that Joan of Arc was an Egyptian human-feline hybrid? I need to get a revised prayer card for her featuring this image.) It’s a marketing ploy masquerading as significance, substance through association.

It’s not like this sort of nonsense hasn’t been tried before. The Beatles cast such a massive shadow over the realms of pop music and popular culture that it’s a given that those threads would be repeatedly picked up and pursued for reasons both noble and exploitive. Nothing can match the 1978 musical, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in terms of sheer crapulent audacity.

For a while, a friend and I were engaged in an intense game of “can you top this” involving terrible movies. While a cheapo Turkish ripoff of Star Wars took the grand prize for all-around ineptitude, its incoherent mix of Islamic platitudes and shag-carpeted sasquatches is still more watchable than Sgt. Pepper’s is. Even as camp, it’s nigh unbearable, and this is from someone who will sit through Xanadu whenever it pops up on cable TV. It makes Skidoo look like Casablanca.

The film is, at its core, a paradox. It’s a celebration of the power of music against the corruption of the music business, but the film itself is as cynical, bloated, and venal as any of the villainous forces depicted onscreen. Each frame oozes pure, uncut 1970’s unctuousness as it attempts to ingratiate itself with the audience through a litany of overproduced and poorly contextualized renditions of The Beatles’ songs. It’s all presented with a migraine-inducing degree of literalness (It’s Maxwell and his Silver Hammer! It’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds! Hey, have you met Mr. Mustard yet? The Egg Man and the Walrus apparently walked out due to a contract dispute) that completely misses what made the original songs so damn interesting.

It also doesn’t help that the film features no dialogue, only the songs and narration (provided by George Burns). As a result, much of the characters’ emoting is done via broad pantomime. It’s a bold directorial move, and one that gives the viewer the impression that one is watching a grade school play performed by a gaggle of hyperactive (retarded?) schoolchildren. Poor Peter “Billy Shears” Frampton fares especially badly on this score, as he chews the scenery with clueless gusto. The Bee Gees just seem kind of confused and sad in comparison.

I’d love to see a deluxe DVD release of the film with an audio track of the director’s instructions during filming: “Happy, Peter, happy! Now sad! Sad! Now drugged! ‘Drugged’, I said, not ‘having an orgasm!’”

So, yeah, the bar has been set pretty low for not creating the worst Beatles tribute ever, but anything’s possible when the Gallagher brothers are involved.

From the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band OST (1978):

Steve Martin – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

George Burns – Fixing a Hole

the little bunny wanted to kill everyone

Easter is a big event here at Armagideon Time HQ, not because of the religious aspects (I’m an atheist and the wife is an “accomplished” – meaning she doesn’t feel the need to practice anymore – Catholic), but because of the opportunity to celebrate all things lagomorphic. I knew going in to this relationship that rabbits would always play a big part of my wife’s life. Currently we have nine of the little critters: a clan of rex rabbits that live and play together in two big cages, and an elderly rabbit handed off to us by a co-worker’s family. Rabbit-themed nick-knacks and toys can be found in every corner of our house and garden, from statues to weathervanes to stuffed animals to netsuke.

The bunnies figured large into our home-buying decision. When we toured the wrecked shell of our future home, we saw the small half-bedroom at the top of the second floor landing and simultaneously said “This would be a perfect place for the rabbits.” I don’t have a computer room, but our rabbits have their own bedroom.

My wife just reminded me that early on in our relationship, when we were “friends with potential,” she named one of her pet rabbits “Otto,” which was my punk rock name and a subtle hint about her feelings towards me. When I ended up asking another girl in our social circle out instead, she says she used to look at the rabbit and mutter “What a stupid name.” It all worked out in the end, though. Such is the power of bunny magic.

(The shared name also led to some odd situations, like the time she was explaining to friends about she got a cut on her lip: “Otto was jumping around on the bed like a wild man, and kicked me in the face.” The looks those people gave me…)

In the name of General Holly, Oswald, and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, I have pulled from my musical top hat this small sampler of bun-iferous tracks.

King Missile – The Bunny Song (from They, 1988) – There is a real darkness beneath the fuzzy, cuddly surface that the rabbit race does not wish mankind to know about. Until it’s too late…

The Damned – White Rabbit (from Machine Gun Ettiquette, 1979) – Brilliantly wrong.

Los Gatos Negros – Hey Hey Bunny (from the Le Beat Bespoke compilation, 2004) – This compilation of “Swinging London” 1960’s dance tracks has quickly become one of my favorite albums of all time.

PINE*am – Pull the Rabbit Ears (from Pull the Rabbit Ears, 2005) – Cute song, terrible advice. Rabbit teeth aren’t that sharp, but they can bite with the force of an industrial stapler.

(A pre-emptive “Yes, I’m aware of it” to UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” and the Throwing Muses’ “Rabbits Dying”.)

the visitors are our friends

From the land of Kow Pad Gai and Thaksinomics, here’s the pop duo Raffy Nancy (not a collaboration between this fellow and this unfortunate soul, although that would have been something to behold) with “UFO”:



No, I don’t understand it, either.

My wife picked up this album back when she watched a lot of Asian music video programs on the International Channel. The paucity of decent pop music at the time led her far off the beaten path. As a consequence, her CD collection is full of some really bizarre stuff, both foreign and domestic, from the early-to-mid 1990’s.

Raffy Nancy – UFO (from Raffy Nancy) - I'm unsure of the exact release dats, seeing as how I can't read Thai. There's an Independence Day reference in the video, which places it sometime after the summer of 1996 or thereabouts.

The more astute – or nerdy – among you may have noticed that the title for today’s post comes from the excellent sci-fi miniseries (and absolutely terrible ongoing TV series) V. When the hype machine surrounding Independence Day started up, the marketing people placed ads featuring a massive flying saucer hovering over New York in nearly every subway station in Boston. My friend and I came up with a plan to paint giant red V’s over all of the posters. We didn’t carry it out, though, because we were cowards and we were lazy. It would have been really funny…for the handful of people able to understand the joke.

today I might be mad

Today is Good Friday, commemorating the death of a wise man who tried to explain that compassion is more important than dogma. The powers that be nailed him to a cross for his efforts, and the blood has been flowing freely ever since.

Yes, yes, there have been plenty of secular atrocities in the history of mankind, but finger-pointing is not absolution. Tossing statistics around or trying to establish a moral equivalence index for atrocities overlooks the fact that each death – any death – is a tragedy, regardless of motivation. Besides, when a given religious creed has to posit itself vis-à-vis Cambodia’s Year Zero or the French Reign of Terror in terms of relative brutality, the issue becomes rather moot.

Humanity’s capacity for missing the point must be encoded in our genes. Take the most benign message of love and understanding, and there will be some idiot out there who’ll try and craft it into a weapon to use against others. How else could one explain the transmogrification from “The world can be a cruel place, so treat others with kindness” to “I hate queers, feminists, and anyone else who is different from me”? If you're going to follow the scripture to the letter, then follow all of the scripture. Don’t cherry-pick the parts that best justify your own narrow-minded world view, like you were some teenaged boy dog-earing the most salacious passages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

I’m not opposed to spirituality, though I have little use for it myself. It ought to be a personal voyage of introspection, rather than simply swallowing and regurgitating received doctrine without question. It’s not the words or gestures that count, it’s the meaning.

Tegan and Sara – Where Does the Good Go? (from So Jealous, 2004) – Where? Well, after one deducts the mandatory laziness, misguided intent, apathy, unforeseen consequences, and selfishness taxes, the take-home good rarely exceeds 12% of the original gross total.

Herman’s Hermits – I’m Into Something Good (from The Very Best of Herman’s Hermits, 2005) – My wife uses this song to dislodge other unwanted songs that get stuck in her head. I employ “Heart of Glass” for similar situations.

The Easybeats – Friday on My Mind (from Friday on My Mind, 1967) – I guarantee that some time between five and six PM today, this song will be played on a classic rock/oldies format radio station. I have more confidence in that statement than I have in the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

The Associates – Tell Me Easter’s on Friday (from Fourth Drawer Down, 1981) – Do marshmallow Peeps dream of gloomy new wave?

I never travel far without a little cube ship

(picture courtesy of Dave Lartigue)

Children by the million, are you ready for assimilation? So speaks Paul Wester-borg!

I love the ‘Mats, I really do. In the grand word association game of life, “The Replacements” are front and center whenever I come across the term “college radio” …more so than The Smiths, The Cure, R.E.M, or any other representative of the cluster of acts associated with that particular tag.

There’s something about listening to “Left of the Dial” that makes me want to invent a time machine to travel back to 1987 and enroll in UMass-Amherst’s English program. Then I remember how I used to stay up until three in the morning finishing overdue term papers because I pissed away my time hanging out with friends and visiting used record stores, and the nostalgia quickly morphs into a vague feeling of unresolved dread.

College was fun. So fun that I never, ever wish to repeat the experience. As a student, I mean. After graduation, I took a job at my alma mater and have been happily ensconced there for over a decade now. One of the perks of the position is that I can sit on the curbside and observe collegiate life without having to actively participate in it. Every trip to the vending machines or ATM reveals new sociological and popcult insights.

The window dressing changes from year to year, but certain aspects have remained reliably constant since my early 1990’s undergrad salad days. College socialists will always be idealistically clueless, and will recoil at the suggestion that the human experience cannot be explained by a handful of reductive theories. College Republicans will talk a lot a militaristic bullshit, yet have convenient excuses about why they personally aren’t doing the fighting and dying. College Democrats will continue to dress like they work at the Gap (or Blockbuster Video).

…and no matter what fashion for hipster poets, writers, or other artistes is trendy at the moment (currently a Strokes-ian “New York” faux 70’s junkie look ‘round these parts), there will always be a substantial percentage of that population who have adopted a Paul Westerberg-inspired look: blue jeans, workboots or beat up sneakers, a flannel or simple buttoned-down shirt, stubble and a mop of short yet unruly hair. It’s a cleaner cut (but still casually rumpled) precursor to the grunge look, and it’s a comfortable fashion, especially suited to the Northern climes of Minnesota or Boston. (It shares some elements in common with the “Michael Stipe,” although Stipists prefer slacks and boat shoes, tuck in their shirts, and frequently wear workman’s caps and have soul patches.)

While Paul Westerberg might not have invented the style (which seems to be an logical adaptation to certain climates – for example, New England college campuses) I still tend to associate it with the man and his music. Hence this internal monologue the other day, as I waited for a herd of creative writing students to pass by:

“Wow. It’s a tribe of Westerberg clones – no, Wester-borgs!”

Yes, I stretched a mildly amusing pun into a full-on post. That’s how I roll -- like a shopping cart that has been run over by a snow plow a couple of times.

Paul Westerberg – Dyslexic Heart (from the Singles OST, 1992) – Singles is an interesting little timepiece of a movie. Every time I watch it, I find myself wondering what happened to my generation’s spirit. The culture wars over hip-hop and political correctness, the in-your-face activism of ACT UP and PETA, the sense that a newer, better era was dawning after 12 years of Reagan and Reagan-lite… There was something there that evaporated at some point. I’m not misremembering this, am I?

Then I see a conservatively-dressed woman my age get off the subway at State Street station, the scar from an old piercing prominent on the side of her nose, and I know the answer.

William Shatner – It Was a Very Good Year (from Spaced Out: The Best of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, 1998) – One good Star Trek reference deserves another…and a terrible Star Trek reference deserves something like this track.

say yes to one and let the other one ride

Yesterday, friend CJ used my ice cream post as means of sliding past a bit of writer’s block. (I’ll never look at a creamsicle the same way again.) Today I’m referencing his post as a lead in to a brief look into the process – as much as there is one – I use in putting together theme posts. It’s all part of the 24/7 ouroboros buffet that is the blogosphere. Let the meta-goodness commence!

It all begins with a theme. Generally speaking, there are three ways that themes occur to me:

- inspirational – “Bolt from the blue” stuff.

- procrustean – Sometimes I’ll hear a song that I want to spotlight, and will weave an entire post around a certain aspect of it.

- opportunistic – This includes time-specific posts such as obituaries, tributes, commemorations, and holiday specials.

For some reason, I do better when I work on the fly. The ice cream and April Fool’s posts were conceived and written in the space of a half hour. If I put too much thought into creating a long form post, I tend to get bogged down by minutae, creating a sitiation akin to Leibnitz’s history of the House of Brunswick (i.e. excessively detailed and never completed). There’s a post I’ve been working on for the past week that’s been languishing in my documents folder because of tangential drift issues.

Track selection can be a tricky affair. While there are rare occasions where I’m able to figure out which songs I wish to use from the get-go, most of the time the process involves a bit of digging. The Windows file search utility and a glance at my archive spreadsheet, plus ample use of AMG, Wikipedia, and the Flex database are invaluable in this. When those fail, it’s time to make a trip to the attic and sift through my non-digitized music collection, which due to environmental hazards, is not the most pleasant of experiences.

(On a related note, for some inexplicable reason, any time I have to go upstairs to search for something, my bladder reflexively sends a burningly urgent “MUST PEE NOW!” signal to my brain, no matter whether I relieved myself before the expedition or not. Does this happen to anyone else, or is it just another irritating aspect of being Andrew?)

There are other factors to consider when selecting songs. Did I use a song by the same artist in the past month? I try to avoid dipping into the same wells too frequently for ethical and aesthetic reasons. (In all honesty, I could easily do what I’m doing here using the collected discographies of only a half-dozen acts – bis, The Clash, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Carter USM, The Byrds, and Lene Lovich.)

On occasions when there’s a wide selection tracks pertaining to a given theme (i.e. ice cream), I have to cull the pool down to a reasonably postable number. Some themes could easily warrant a four CD box set and I know folks who relish the task of putting such things together for their own use, but it’s not what Armagideon Time is about. When deciding which song make the final cut, I factor in both my personal tastes with the various songs’ levels of obscurity. There’s no point in my posting a song by UberSuperIndieBand if everyone is already familiar with it, and I’m apathetic about it.

Based on the feedback I’ve gotten, it’s my personal touch that sets this place apart, and I try to reflect that in the song choices. It’s not that I’ve necessarily “forgotten” or “shown no love” for an omitted track, it’s that I picked what resonated with me and what the readers might not have been aware of.

Throw in some rambling commentary and purchase links, find a vaguely relevant panel or sequence of panels from an old issue of Captain Marvel Adventures or some random DC comic book, and you’re good to go!

Big Drill Car – Freedom of Choice (from Batch, 1987) – Oh, no, it’s a Devo cover…and a very nice one, too.

The Lovin’ Spoonful – Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind? (from Do You Believe in Magic, 1965) – Remember when Dylan drove Nat crazy by repeatedly playing this song on the Peach Pit’s jukebox? That was a stunningly subtle way to show his inner conflict over having to choose between Kelly and Brenda. The early 1990’s were my personal “lost (part-of-a-)decade.”

In case anyone asks:

Hüsker Dü – Indecision Time (I used a Dü track a few days ago.)

Scissor Sisters – I Can’t Decide (Great song, like a raunchy outtake from The Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack, but no.)

Black Flag – Can’t Decide (Listened to this way too many times in college. My War was the worst choice for a breakup album ever.)

Twisted Nerve – Indecision (Interesting, but not the group’s best work.)

The only emperor is the emperor of...

...ice cream!

...ICE CREAM!

...ICE CREAM!

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

Captain Beefheart - Ice Cream for Crow (from Ice Cream for Crow, 1982) - This musical oddity puts me in mind of this, for some reason.

-----

The Amazing Pickles - I Like Ice Cream (from a 1969 single) - Mmmmm... Pickles, ice cream, and bubblegum. A sign of pregnancy? Or a symptom of a potential tapeworm infestation?

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Ariane - Ice Cream (from a 1966 single) - Music for aller-allez danser... Feel free to get your Francophonic frug on.

and I reveal unto you the power and the glory

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I would like to take the opportunity on this most important of days to present to you the greatest song ever.

Better than Loverboy’s “Hot Girls in Love.”

Better than Michael Bolton’s entire discography.

Better than the hipster wankfest that would result from a Lily Allen/Arctic Monkeys/Amy Winehouse collaboration.

Even the glories of the seraphic choir come up short in comparison to its celestial beauty.

And so, without further ado, I bring unto you, my children…

The Greatest Song in the History of Mankind

you’ll find that it’s stranger than known

My headache has finally subsided, thank goodness. I stepped out onto the patio late last night to get some air and to shake the pseudoephedrine phantoms loose, and I saw a meteor streak past the lower part of Orion. It’s odd that even though Mt. Misery is a couple miles closer to Boston than North Woburn is, and suburban sprawl -- and the attendant light pollution -- has swept over the city in the past twenty-five years, the view of the stars up here is so much clearer than it was in my childhood stomping grounds. It must be because our neighborhood lies between Horn Pond and the Middlesex Fells Reservation, and the parks block out much of the light from Boston and Route 93.

I’m a materialist to a fault, and as such, didn’t read any more into the meteor than it being a randomly observed astronomical event. But, y’know, that’s more than enough. It was an excellent way to cap off a pretty painful day.

Portishead – Wandering Star (from Dummy, 1994)

Hüsker Dü – Eight Miles High (originally a bonus single included the 1984 Zen Arcade LP, collected on the the Eight Miles High/Makes No Sense at All EP, 1990)

and all I needed was just a breath of fresh air

A pox on:

- my deviated septum
- airborne pollen and other contaminants
- the canned air at my workplace
- meth heads whose stupid habit made it a hassle to get decent sinus medication
- the nausea-inducing sinus headache I have had for three days now

I’m going to lie down for a while. While I’m going to require silence, you can crank up these rather loud slices of fine punk rock.

The Replacements – I Bought a Headache (from Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, 1981)

Poison Idea – In My Head Ache (from Pick Your King, 1983)

love it, love it, I need to

Appearances and Chamber of Commerce fact sheets to the contrary, there’s a thinly-veiled current of darkness that flows through the tree-lined avenues and perfectly manicured lawns of Riverdale, USA. Pay close enough attention, and you will start to discern the seams where the all-American, squeaky-clean vision of Norman Rockwell has been unnaturally joined to the nightmare world of David Lynch.

Every community has its secrets. In the case of Riverdale, these include a hidden coven of witches, a young man with a horrific eating disorder and a penchant for odd headgear, and some highly unconventional teenage mating rituals.

…and then there’s the secret life of Alexander Cabot. Folks familiar with the character from The Josie and The Pussycats cartoon know him as a cowardly and ineffectual bumbler with a penchant for moddish fashions. His on-screen life was forever stuck in the shadow of his tyrannical sister, Alexandra, whose own dabblings in the dark arts were redacted from the animated record. The real story is a bit more…complicated…

Here Alex expounds his political philosophy; a hard-right mélange of ideas borrowed from Rand, Nietzsche, and Hitler. Notice how women are specifically singled out as being “weak,” and by extention, inferior, and how Alex is willing to use actual physical violence to prove his point. The large dollar sign that adorns the back of his jacket could be interpreted as a symbol of his Mammonesque greed, his commitment to unrestrained captialism, or (most likely) of his lousy taste in clothes.

The forceful manner in which Alex expresses his views is quite remarkable, and it makes me wonder what’s going on inside that head of his…

Oh, it’s one of those scenarios. It’s not that uncommon a situation, actually. I’ve heard rumors that Herman Goering was into that sort of thing, too.

One could also infer that the legs belong to the fresh corpse of an unfortunate streetwalker who has been ritually murdered by Alex, a la American Psycho, with Josie and Melody playing the roles of Patrick Bateman’s friends, oblivious to his psychotic predations. It all depends on how dark one wants to go with it.

Saint Etienne – Stormtrooper in Drag (from Continental, 1997) – I wanted to comment “More than Numan,” but the original version was a Paul Gardiner (Tubeway Army’s bass player) release. (Numan did produce, co-compose, and perform on the track, though.)

The Barbarians – Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl? (from Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl? 2000) – A 60’s garage rock novelty from scenic Cape Cod. The band was best known for having a one-handed drummer (two decades before Def Leppard’s Rick Allen returned to his drum set after losing an arm).

Siouxsie & The Banshees – Metal Postcard (Mittageisen) (from The Scream, 1978) – Inspired by a work by German dadaist John Heartfield, is this track a send-up of fascism along the lines of Spinrad’s The Iron Dream? Or a cold romanticization of totalitatian attitudes? It’s difficult to untangle the knot of fascist influences – aesthetic, ideological, transgressive – that ran through the early British punk scene. (Also see: Sid Vicious’ famous swastika t-shirt and the vile joke that was “Belsen Was a Gas.”)

size doesn’t matter

Brevity is the soul of wit. – William Shakespeare, dead white guy

Who has short songs? We have short songs. Here are five succinct tracks with a total runtime of two minutes and forty-seven seconds.

Before anyone asks: Yes, I am aware of the Dead Kennedys’ “Short Songs” and Napalm Death’s record-setting “You Suffer” (under three seconds in length).

Bikini Kill – In Accordance to Natural Law (from The Singles, 1998) – Kathleen is angry.

Descendents – Weinerschnitzel (from the Fat EP, 1981) – Punk rock guys are hungry.

Phil Hundley – 30 Second Affair (from the Red Snerts compilation, 1981) – Punkabilly heartbreak.

The Raunchettes – What? Scuze Me! (from The Secret Team compilation, 1988) – She’s found out that you are a fake.

Wire – Brazil (from Pink Flag, 1977) – Great art punk did these fellows make.

is truly outrageous, truly truly truly outrageous

This is Jem, who has recently decided that I’m his bestest friend in the whole wide world. Unlike the other members of his extended feline family, who are content to express affection for their humans in a more mellow fashion, Jem is a cat of action and expects “Boy” to respond in kind to his current obsessions.

His name came from the white spot between his eyes, which I thought looked like a diamond when he was a newborn kitten, hence “Gem.” My wife changed the spelling to “Jem” when filling out paperwork at the vet’s office, most likely because she was thinking of Jem Finer of The Pogues. He also responds to Jemma, Jembo, JemJam, and “AAAAARGH! Those are my toes, dammit!”

I’ve seen other bloggers ghostwrite cutesy posts from their pets’ point of view. Since I pride myself for keeping things authentic here at Armagideon Time, I’d be uncomfortable putting words into Jem’s tiny mouth. He’s a very clever cat. Why couldn’t he express himself in his own words?

It wasn’t easy getting the little fellow to the keyboard. The first time I tried, he got distracted by some cobwebs on the ceiling, and proceeded to tug at my shirttails and cry until I lifted him up so he could swat at it.

Then he kept dropping a balled up twist tie at my feet in order to let me know it was time for some cat soccer practice. His goal tending skills are remarkable, and mid-air catches are his specialty. Another couple of weeks of drills, and he’ll be ready to sign with Real Madrid.

When Jem finally made it to the keyboard, he managed to type this:

Fdsifjsojvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

;[ppoo[[[[[[[[[[[

AdsfDSAEDWSADEWFRWFEP;SQW qhasjkfspgspo

…before he somehow stumbled across a hotkey combination that reset all my display settings. While I was trying to fix the problem, he snatched my Iron Fist Minimates figure off of the computer desk and ran downstairs with it. A mad chase ensued, first with Jem, and then with Addy the beagle-boxer, who picked up the figure after Jem dropped it under the dining table.

So ends that experiment. Next time, I’m going to get one of my wife’s pet turtles to co-host instead.

Jem and The Holograms – Theme From Jem – I never even made the connection between Jem the cat and Jem the cartoon until a couple months ago. Since then, I’ve found myself singing the theme to him whenever he’s engaged in his usual antics. Freezepop added a cute cover version of the song as a hidden track on 2004’s Fancy Ultra Fresh album.

The Cure – The Lovecats (from a 1983 single, collected on Japanese Whispers, 1983) – This song is the end of the road as far as my interest in The Cure goes. The Top was an interesting, trippy failure, but it all went careening downhill from there.

for a peculiar sensibility of temperament

He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

– Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Poor Roderick Usher. I empathize with his condition, having experienced bouts of hyperesthesia on several occasions. They almost always comes on the heels of some physical illness, and I’ve learned to accept it as part of the recovery process. Rather than manifesting itself as a languid morbity, in my case it comes in the form of extreme irritability. As I’ve been frequently ill these past few months, I’ve also been frequently irritable.

This morning was exceptionally bad. When these episodes happen at home, I can cloister myself in the bedroom in order to block out all unwanted stimuli (apart from the dogs’ usual rambunctious idiocy) until the feeling passes. I don’t have the same option at my job, however, and though my duties require a minimal amount of human contact, it can be a very noisy work environment (especially on Monday mornings) that will invevitably spill over the partitions and into my cubicle. The fuss and noise and bother got so unbearable at one point that I actually had to plug my ears with my fingers and close my eyes. (That sounds more dramatic than it actually was.)

Fortunately, I have a personal collection of soothing “peculiar sounds” on my portable hard drive that I can queue up in order to get back on a more even keel. It consists mostly of electronic music, but the Suburban Lawns’ self-titled album and a compilation of 60’s Euro-discotek cuts are in there as well.

I Monster – Who Is She? (from Neveroddoreven, 2003) – I caught a Macy’s commercial that featured I Monster’s “Daydream in Blue” the other night, and it made me do a double take. I know it’s common practice in the genre to use electronic tracks to score ads, but no marketing wizardry is ever going to erase my memory of the (potentially NSFW) “Daydream in Blue” music video. “Who Is She?” is a delighfully creepy rendition of Mario Nascimbene’s theme song to the 1969 Hammer film, The Vengeance of She.

Goldfrapp – Hairy Trees (from Black Cherry, 2003) – Black Cherry is right up there on my short list of favorite albums of all time. A friend of mine once dismissed it as being too derivative of Lamb’s material, but I honestly don’t hear it. This track in particular is a thing of ethereal wonder woven around some rather suggestive lyrics.

and I haven’t slept in days

It has dawned on me that I should have come up with some kind of plan before going back to daily posts. Granted, it’s taken me two months before I began to feel the burn, but I am feeling it in spades tonight. For the past hour or so, I’ve been reviewing various half-finished topics to see if there’s anything that could be completed with a minimum amount of effort. Then I realized that the obligation to post every day was self-created, and I shouldn’t rush something out the door for the sake of updating when the topic deserves better than that.

So, in lieu of anything weighty, here’s a much loved track from my library that perfectly captures my current state of being.

Alien Sex Fiend – Now I’m Feeling Zombified (from a 1990 single, collected on Drive My Rocket, 1994) - The undead like to boogie down, too. It's just that the putrefaction issue makes it harder for them to do so.

sitting in a corner in imperfect clothes

I spent most of my Saturday playing the adequate PS2 port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. It has the same “expansion pack” feel to it that Liberty City Stories had, although I’m enjoying it far more than I did that game. It’s no San Andreas, but it’s a decent waste of twenty dollars nonetheless.

The game also features a return to licensed soundtrack music, a feature sorely missed in the previous game. There’s a very nice spread of retro tracks covering all the expected genres. The pop and wave material is where my interest is greatest, and even though I have most of the featured songs already, it’s fascinating to see what selections Rockstar Leeds picked for use in the game. Three of the big 80’s pop axes are heavily represented: the Vince Clarke faction (with tracks from The Assembly, Yazoo, Alison Moyet, and Depeche Mode), the Trevor Horn combine (with ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Art of Noise), and the extended Human League family (with Heaven 17, Human League, and Oakey and Moroder’s “Together in Electric Dreams”).

While a large portion of the material comes from bands featured on the original GTA: Vice City soundtrack, I was pleasantly surprised to discover “I’m in Love With a German Film Star” by The Passions on the tracklist for the Emotion 98.3 in-game “radio” playlist. It was sandwiched in between Elkie Brooks’ version of “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” and “I Want to Know What Love is” by Foreigner, but the GTA series has a history of strange musical groupings. (“Sunglasses at Night” on Vice City’s “new wave” station and the Ozzy track on San Andreas’s grunge/alternative station both come to mind.)

Best (and probably only really) known for the ethereal pop of the much covered “I’m in Love With a German Film Star,” The Passions started with a fairly standard postpunk sound that developed into something that could be seen as a precursor to the shoegaze genre of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It’s possesses the same dreamy introspection, without the heavy accent on sonic effects and with a much colder tone. (A new micro-genre, perhaps? Entropic Proto-Shoegaze?) I’d venture to say that if you were to draw a triangle with Songs of the Free-era Gang of Four on one corner and My Bloody Valentine and pre-Lovelife Lush on the other two, The Passions would dangle precariously in the center, depending on which song was being played at the moment.

Here’s the band performing their signature song on Top of the Pops in 1981:



The Passions – I’m in Love with a German Film Star (from 30,000 Feet Over China, 1981)

The Passions – Man on the Tube (from Michael & Miranda, 1980) – This is an example of their earlier postpunk material, which echoes Delta 5, The Au Pairs, etc.

in 1978, an aspiring chef was given a ring of power by a dying alien

A watershed moment in my political education occurred during a protest against the first Gulf War, way back in 1991. People from all around the region had gathered in front of the Federal Building in Boston’s Government Center to express their disapproval of Bush the Elder’s “splendid little war,” and being of the same frame of mind and nothing better to do that day, I joined them.

It was an interesting experience, but in hindsight I’ve realized how choreographed the affair truly was on both sides of the barricades. The police set up a “straw man” line of gates far out from the building with the understanding that the protestors were going to push closer, and so factored a false concession into their crowd control procedure. (Somewhere, in some photojournalist’s file cabinet or FBI anti-subversive database is a picture of an 18 year old Andrew on the verge of doing a faceplant after getting his boot caught on one of the riot fences.)

The protest itself was a tepid mix of warmed over Vietnam Era platitudes and sincere yet inarticulate convictions. For my part, I merely chanted the lyrics to some anti-war punk songs where I swapped in more topical names and places. (I was photographed a lot that day. I don’t know why, except that I was a colorfully costumed punk rocker at a time when that subculture was at its lowest ebb around these parts.) The demonstration may not have been effective, but it was cathartic, and that’s a far better alternative to giving in to despair.

Then the fucking professional socialists showed up and it all turned to shit. Where the gathering had started as an unfocused howl of protest, the socialists brought order, and queueing, and “You people would be more effective over here, and you folks over there, and would anyone like to volunteer to risk arrest on our behalf because we don’t want to miss Seinfel—I mean the 5th Internationalists cell meeting tonight.” I’m generally sympathetic to the socialists’ ideology, although my own views run more toward a pragmatic egalitarian idealism. (Slow trickles of water have brought entire mountain ranges down, while rigidly overreaching dogma about revolutionary change ends up benefiting only vultures and other carrion eaters when put into practice. I won’t compromise on the idea of equal rights, though. That issue is a no-brainer.) That said, I’ve yet to meet a capital “S” Socialist I could tolerate for more than thirty seconds.

After they had insinuated themselves into the protest, the socialist faction had the crowd move away from the federal building so that they could be lectured on a broad series of topics completely unrelated to the present concern. As they launched into their ideological laundry list, I could see a large number of attendees make puzzled faces at each other. The crowd gradually began to disperse, as small groups of folks who came out to express their disapproval of Bush the Elder’s military adventurism drifted off towards either Quincy Market or the nearby subway station.

In hijacking the discussion in order to grind their own axes, the socialists had effectively killed it.

Which brings us to the second issue of Mark Waid and George Perez’s The Brave and the Bold relaunch. The book has been garnering a lot of positive reviews, and quite justifiably so. It’s great to see Perez’s excellent art again on a monthly basis, and the book does capture that old fashioned DC magic that’s been missing from too many of the company’s titles in recent years. At the same time, though, it’s a lot like catching a performance by Midnight Train, a tribute band dedicated to “the magic of Journey.” The songs are played note perfect, but all one is really getting is a hyper-polished simulacrum of familiar material. (Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, on the other hand, has a Nouvelle Vague feel to it, using familiar material as a springboard to launch into new and interesting directions.)

I cut my comics-reading teeth on Bob Haney’s 1970’s B&B run, and there was a mad sense of “anything goes” to those old stories, logic be damned. The current series, by contrast, feels like a calculated, sterile recreation of the old material along the lines of Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you asking, “how do these half-assed musical analogies tie back to your anecdote about socialists?” By way of this, my friends.

I do get what Waid is trying to do here, Kara’s schoolgirl crush on one of her “big brother’s” cool pals. It’s a plausible bit of characterization, and Green Lantern does a creditable job of setting her straight on why she needs to put a stop to it. What I don’t understand is why Green Lantern has to repeatedly remind himself that Supergirl is “17.” Or rather, “17, 17, 17, 17, 17” as it continues on subsequent pages.

It adds an element of creepiness to the story for the sake of a clichéd comedic trope. The “statutory rape temptation” gag was tired in when it was used in Three’s Company, nearly three decades ago. (Although, I’d love to see GL taking a cold shower, then having a meeting with Superman at the Regal Beagle where he malaprops his way through a series of lame sexual double entendres while explaining what happened on the mission.) It’s time for those kinds of jokes to take their place on the “unpleasant humor of the past” shelf next to quips about women drivers and the entirety of Don Rickles’ routine.

There’s a tendency within the comics internet to use the indignation wagon as a Trojan Horse for less lofty objectives, such as attacking a certain creator or company one has a grudge against. Like with the protest I mentioned, issues that do deserve discussion get hijacked and manipulated, spurring backlashes that toss the babies out with the bathwater. There are also the procrustean beds of the conspiracy theorists, where lines between cluelessness and malice get blurred for the sake of a grand unified theory of that most sexy of beasts, the “hidden agenda.” Ignorance is not a defense, but the remedies are different for deliberate acts and for passive offensiveness. I’m not asserting that broader agendas are a myth, but that aggregated institutional cultures should not automatically be taken as an active conspiracy.

There is a lot that is shitty about comics, especially in the superhero genre these days, but it’s ludicrous to think a bunch of shrill jihads which too often mask personal vendettas or delusions of fan entitlement will bring about change for the better.

Someone who has once had a fork jammed into his or her eye will come away from reading an issue of Jams-Forks-In-People’s-Eyes Man with a completely different take on the subject matter than someone who has made through life without that unfortunate experience. Part of why The Brave and the Bold #2 skeeved me out as much as it did is because I have had the misfortune of knowing too many guys with fixations on teenage girls. I’m not talking To Catch a Predator material either, but men who would otherwise give one the impression of being down to earth and reasonable folks…until the conversation turns to the latest underage starlet, popstar, et cetera, and things get very ugly, very quickly. In that personal context, a lame joke in an otherwise decent comic can feel extremely sinister, especially when it doesn’t even need to be there in the first place. This didn’t help, either, even if it arguably served a purpose within the story, though all description -- or illustration -- is necessarily selective.

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap – Young Girl (from Young Girl, 1968) – I used to have a cut-out bin compilation cassette called The Sounds of San Francisco, which featured a bunch of 60’s acts from the Bay Area. This song was on it, and it stuck out like a sore thumb amidst all the psychedelic rock cuts. To this day, every time I hear it, I feel the urge to fast forward to The Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard.” (The Seeds were actually from Los Angeles, but sell-through cheapo compilations bow to no sense of rhyme or reason.)

Steve Lawrence – Go Away, Little Girl (from Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, 2004) – Years ago, I was as some party and there was a drunken metalhead who could have been Steve Lawrence’s twin brother. This fellow’s version Eydie Gorme was a drunk/stoned/insane (?) stripper, and they spent the evening slapping each other in the face and calling each other rude names. It’s funny; I can remember that vividly, but I can barely recall any lines of any of the plays I was supposed to have memorized in college.

D-Day – Too Young To Date (from a 1979 single, collected on New Wave Hits of the 80’s, Vol. 1) – Offering a view from the other side of the gender gap, we have a raunchy slice of power pop out of Austin, Texas.

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I’m going to pull a Casey Kasem here and congratulate pal Benjamin Birdie for his extra special guest visitor in the comments section of today’s installment of The Rack, the webcomic he and Kevin Church put out every Monday and Friday. Way to go, Benjamin! I’m officially jealous. This track is dedicated to you, my friend.

New Order – Touched by the Hand of God (from a 1987 single, collected/remixed on (The Best of) New Order, 1994) - Is it just me, or does anyone else hear echoes of Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" in those rising orchestral bits of the song?

I know it when I hear it

I mentioned in a previous post that I used to dabble in the visual arts. I had a raw, fairly modest talent for drawing and painting that has long since atrophied into insignificance. Most of blame for that lies with my utter lack of anything even vaguely resembling discipline and my total disdain for repetitive tasks, but the decisive factor that killed any interest I had in becoming an artist was the Drawing 101 class I took as a sophomore in college.

The class was taught by an MBA graduate student who had been an undergrad art major. It would have been just another somnabulatory three-credit cakewalk except for two things. One, the instructor had an insane fondness for R.E.M’s Out of Time, and had the CD on repeat for the entire semester. Prior to this I had no opinion of the band one way or another (although I thought “Radio Free Europe” was rather nice), but over the course of the ten week semester I grew to positively loathe Michael Stipe’s voice.

The second problem with the course was that the instructor set aside fifteen minutes per class for critiquing sessions, and every student was required to contribute their opinions about their classmates’ work. Now I fully understand the importance of peer review, having had my writing (and confidence) picked apart in many creative writing and playwriting classes. In those cases, however, the professors were highly experienced in that sort of activity, and were able to guide the proceedings with subtle, skillful hand, making sure that everyone stayed on target.

The woman teaching the drawing class possessed none of those undergrad wrangling skills, and each critiquing session turned into a community theater production of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Because it was an intro level class, there were more than a few non-artistic types who took the class because they thought it would be a fun way to earn graduation credits. The poor saps were mercilessly flayed alive by a vocal minority of asshole art majors with delusions of grandeur: “And what, exactly, is this blobby thing here supposed to be?” It was awful to watch, and because attendance factored into one’s final grade, impossible to avoid.

I ended up skirting the issue of my own participation by saying the same thing about every drawing I was supposed to comment on, “Nice use of shading.” The instructor thought I was being a wiseass, but the truth is I registered for Drawing 101, not Advanced Techniques for Destroying Self-Esteem. In an upper level course, where everyone has a shared commitment to the craft and a sense of the effort involved, an open group critiquing process is an invaluable and frequently humbling learning experience. When conducted by an assortment of arrogant and insecure freshmen and sophomores, it inevitable degenerates into a wilding. There’s an inversely proportional relationship in these things where the folks with the biggest mouths end up having the least substance to offer.

Since I put my contact info in the sidebar, I’ve been getting emails from performers asking me to review their material here. I have to say I’m very flattered by this; it gives me an inflated sense of relevance that I’m not certain I truly deserve. The rub is that anyone familiar with what I’ve been doing here over the past ten months should understand that this is not a music blog per se, but rather an ongoing, rambling exploration of my whims and obsessions, which just happens to feature musical annotations. I’m not comfortable in the role of critic, as it is traditionally understood. It makes me feel like I’m back in the Drawing 101 studio, being asked to deliver a sanctioned ego blow to some poor Organic Chem major who thought it would be fun to take an art class.

I do make the effort to listen to all the music sent my way, and evangelize offsite when I think the sound fits the tastes of friends and other acquaintances, but the nature of this site and of my thought processes precludes reviews in the traditional sense. Should one of the tracks happen to fit into a theme post about Arion, Lord of Atlantis, that’s another matter.

Plushgun – Just Impolite (http://www.myspace.com/plushgun) – This is one of the tracks submitted to me for review, and I’ve developed a real fondness for it. It reminds me a lot of something from the soundtrack to one of the lesser known 80’s teen movies, which is a good thing. (I can’t tell you how many of those old soundtrack LP’s I’ve hunted down for the sake of a single, otherwise unavailable song.) Individual mileage may vary depending on one’s own brand pop sensibility, but I think it holds a good deal of promise and I’m interested in hearing the band’s follow-up efforts.

…and now back to our regular scheduled randomness:

Desperate Bicycles – The Medium Was Tedium (from a 1977 single) – Sloppy early British punk rock recorded on the slimmest of budgets. It’s from a subgenre that would later be termed “DIY” or “messthetics” (taken from Scritti Politti, who pioneered the aesthetic style before morphing into a mainstream pop act).

grown accustomed to the daily grind

Spring has arrived!

Up here in New England, it means that we only have to suffer through one or two more surprise snowstorms before the traditional six weeks of rain segue into a three month long heat wave. The five or six non-consecutive gorgeous spring days in between make it all worth it, however. Moderation is important, lest the joys of balmy weather make us forget our hard-won regional survival skills. Imagine the chaos that would result if folks round these parts suddenly began to use turn signals or were to strike up friendly conversations with strangers instead of giving them the customary wary look.

There’s still snow from last weekend’s storm on the ground at the moment, although it appears to be melting rapidly, but I did see a couple of robins bob-bob-bobbin’ along in our backyard this morning. It won’t really feel like spring until the cherry tree on our patio starts to blossom. Eventually its roots are going to take out the retaining wall and the whole tree will come crashing down the hill, but the view from the kitchen window while the tree is in bloom is simply breathtaking.

The Lemon Drops – I Live in the Springtime (from the Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era box set, 1998) – Psychedelic flavor, garage rock production.

Slow Children – Spring in Fialta (from Slow Children, 1981) – Nabokov gets a new wave makeover.

Finally, I leave you with the MST3K version of an educational film created to combat the rampant anti-springitism prevalent in 1940’s America. (Ok, it’s about the object by that name and not the season, but who cares? It’s got Coily the Spring Sprite!)

it's a gas to just imagine....

THE ISSUE

The issue of National Geographic sits moldering on a dusty pile of its brethren in the far corner of a Bay Area used book store. The magazine’s cover is partially obscured by a decades old coating of dust and rodent droppings, yet there’s something about it that beckons you to pick it up. The desiccated binding paste crackles as you flip through the pages. Images of a world that was flash by your eyes, until they settle on a single image from a feature on the petrified caveman found in Java.

It’s of a man in his mid-thirties, the rugged sort of adventurer-type long been supplanted as the architect of young boys’ dreams by the New Frontier stardust sprinkled about by John Glenn and NASA. Dressed in jodhpurs and a worn leather jacket, and radiating a casual confidence that could be mistaken for arrogance, the man bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Burt Lancaster. A pretty young blonde has her arms around his shoulders, and the juxtaposition between his rugged masculinity and her movie star beauty could not be more striking.

Something about the image feels familiar. I should know these people, you think, and check out the accompanying caption in an effort to make sense of the feeling. It reads:

(left) Adventurer Rex Mason and Stagg Industries heiress, Sapphire Stagg, at the expedition’s base camp.

The threads connecting this story of personal metamorphosis stretch not only from the Sumatran jungles to a chamber housing a radioactive meteorite in a lost Egyptian pyramid, but further back, to medieval alchemists and the writings of Franz Kafka in 1920’s Prague. It is a story of miraculous happenings and personal tragedy played out against the backdrop of disposable entertainment.

IT'S 1962

It’s 1962, and a brilliant, but disturbed young cyberneticist has embarked on a radical new voyage. Taking inspiration from both Asimov and Mendeleev, William Magnus finds a means of creating robotic avatars of various metallic elements. It is a quantum leap, yet it falls short of a revolutionary paradigm. Compartmentalized and hyper-specialized, limited to artificial beings, Magnus’s discovery must stop before the gates of a transformed world.

THREE YEARS LATER

Three years later, a strange being shapes his arm into a cobalt hammer. (Cobalt being derived from the German kobold, meaning “goblin,” referring to its toxic effects on miners.) His hairless face is corpse-white, echoing the effigies burned by Moravian heretics during medieval Nachthexen ceremonies. The rest of his body is quartered into gaudily colored, oddly textured sections, and flows and shifts with amazing rapidity. The Element Man has arrived, and the threshold forever denied to Magnus and his androids has been crossed decisively.

A simple utterance passes from his lips, and the entire world seems to pause for a moment, perhaps sensing that a strange new chapter in the eternal struggle between the individual and society has begun. “Holy blue Hannah!” says Metamorpho the Element Man, but the voice is that of Rex Mason.

Metamorpho Theme Song (from a Power Records 7”) – This track has made the rounds of several music and comics blogs already. If you happened to miss it then, here’s your chance to enjoy it in all its bizarre glory.

The Movin’ Morfomen – What’s Happened to Me? (from Flashbacks, 1997) – It’s very rare that I come across a track where both the band’s name and the song’s name match the chosen theme as perfectly as does in this bit of 60’s garage rock out of New Mexico. Ah, sweet synergy.

David Bowie – Changes (from Hunky Dory, 1971) – Part of my quixotic effort to erase this song’s association with a diaper commercial.

UK Decay – Battle of the Elements (from For Madmen Only, 1981) – Rex doesn’t strike me as the gothy type. I picture him as the sort of guy who’d hang out at the Playboy Mansion and swap stories with George Kennedy over shots of fine Kentucky bourbon. His one-time partner, Element Girl, did show up in an issue of Sandman, though, so I guess this track is tangentially fitting.

If you prefer to keep your bizarre 1960's DC comics reading separate from your social/musical history, here's where you can buy the two books that went into making this post:

Showcase Presents: Metamorpho, Vol. 1

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century

I give both my highest recommendation.

(Today's post inspired by this, this, and this.)