a cowardly, superstitious lot

Forget the O'Neill/Adams run. Forget the Englehart/Rogers stories. Forget the issue when the Caped Crusader tossed a car battery at a thug. Here is the greatest Batman story ever told -- a public service announcement from late 1949:

"Holy Spygate, Batman!"
"Quick, old chum, dispense the Bat-Race Riot Supression Spray!"
"I speak for the majority, twerp! We don't need any Bat-judicial activism! LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE!"
"Says the man who associates with aliens and pagan feminist separatists! Face it, Batman, you're an elitist who is out of touch with real American values!"
"But, Batman, Hank's middle name is Hussein!"
"Now that I've shown myself to be a man of principle and tolerance, I will unleash my young ward to pander to your basest fears and prejudices!"
Seriously, what the fuck happened to this country's moral conscience in the past sixty years? (That's a rhetorical question. I know the answer all too well.)

The Special AKA - Racist Friend (from In the Studio, 1984) - It's a great bit of socially aware ska, I'll grant you that, but the group lost something crucial after Terry Hall's eyebrows left to join Fun Boy Three.

tell me where there's sanity

"When you get older, you'll understand." So speaks the purported voice of "realism" when cautioning on the pitfalls of youthful idealism. The underlying message is that once one has "bought in" or "sold out" or however one wants wants to spin it, logic dictates that hungry radicalism must give way to a defensive stance. Lock the doors, man the barricades, and beware the ravenous hordes that covet your treasures.

The rousing, yet polite debate in the comments of the Crass post from the other day got me to thinking about politics, specifically where I stand on the ideological spectrum these days. I've dabbled with the various -isms on the left side of the dial over the years -- flirtations both tempestuous and mild with anarchist, socialist, and communist schools of thought. I'm a registered Democrat, but voted SWP and Green in a couple of elections, and have a lasting mistrust of self-labeled "liberals" and "progressives" over the recurring lack of conviction and undercurrents of paternalism on their part.

In the end, doctrinal semantics or theories built on wishful thinking matter less to me than a core principle, namely that everyone deserves a fair shake and equal access to essential goods and services. Egalitarianism is the cornerstone, and the rest is just trivia to be endlessly debated in closed, self-defeating circles.

Dogma and abstract theory have no purpose towards this end. My idealism is rooted in pragmatism forged by years of empirical evidence. Alliances and associations are made and broken depending on how well they serve the greater objectives, and if that means participating a electoral system that is fundamentally broken for the sake of seeing that rights are extended to those who deserve them or defended from those who would subvert them, then so be it. I would rather play a short term game for tangible benefits than a dubious long term strategy that hurts many in the meantime.

I'm with the Enlightenment thinkers on this: People will be people, no matter how educated they are, and the the best we can really strive for is to encourage the better angels of our nature and mitigate the impact of the worse ones.

No revolution, no shift in the political paradigm, no amount of education will eradicate the intrinsic pettiness of the human animal. Trust in socialist revolution and you end up with Year Zero. Trust in free-market self-interest and you end up with...well, take a look around at the mess we're mired in. Trust in mutual co-operation based on shared interests, and it's likely that you've never had to sit through the collective paralysis and bickering of a union gathering or town meeting.

Education and faith mean less than a modicum of awareness and a functioning sense of empathy. The framework of modern civilization has gotten so elaborate and the threads of interdependence so convoluted that it is too easy to fall into a false sense of moral hazard, so that even when the consequences of one's actions manifest themselves it is an easy enough matter to deny, shift, or ignore the blame.

Barring some massive depopulation of the species and a return to scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers, a shift from psuedo-free market capitalism to autonomous soviets or nationalized industries will not address the real problem. Indoctrination of the abolition of currency will not prevent the emergence of would-be Dick Cheneys looking for angles to exploit.

It's a classic Catch-22: Revolutionary change without a mass awakening in civic vigilance is pointless, but if the masses possessed such a sense of vigilance, a revolution would be redundant.

Ten Years After - I'd Love to Change the World (from A Space in Time, 1971) - The sound of the 1960s counterculture collapsing in on itself.

Comsat Angels - Waiting for a Miracle (from Waiting for a Miracle, 1980) - What's the difference between a miracle and the 134 bus? The 134 bus does show up on rare occasions. The only historical inevitability is that people will do foolish things for foolish reasons.

the autumn of my killer robot

He came to us on a brisk October afternoon in 1951. His arrival was heralded by the hum of servo motors and the intoxicating scents of ozone and machine oil.

His name was Timmy Tinkle, he was a robot, and he needed a job.

He was created in the laboratory of Professor Derook, but wanted to leave his surrogate father's shadow and blaze his own path.

Mr. Morris found Timmy a position in the WHIZ-TV warehouse, and he soon proved himself to be a motivated and tireless worker. Many were the days we labored shoulder to mechanical shoulder in the cramped, dusty space, and a bond developed between boy reporter and mechanical man.

Such was the strength of our mutual affection that I failed to see the obvious warning signs -- the failure to properly sign off on shipping manifests, the vicious beating and hospitalization of the night watchman, the way in which the office safe was torn out of the wall and its contents emptied.

I didn't want to believe it. I worked with Timmy. He was my friend. We were closer than brothers. How could such a sweet, gentle construct be a brutal robo-criminal?

In my grief and confusion, I confronted him, wishing more than anything that it was just a silly misunderstanding.

His reaction was terrifying to behold.

I was forced to defend myself, and perhaps the shock of betrayal made me strike back with more force than necessary.

Afterwards, I kneeled over Timmy's inert body and gazed down in disbelief at the shattered remains of my once-close friend.

I prepared to squash his cybernetic corpse into a ball for easy transport to the scrapyard, but my blearly eyes noticed something unusual embedded in Timmy's inner workings.

It was a remote control device planted by Derook. Having managed to create a fully functioning humanoid robot and a complex artificial intelligence unit with vacuum tube era technology, Derook had decided the best way to monetize his discoveries was to use Timmy as a Trojan Robot in order to steal the petty cash box from a minor market broadcast studio.

With Derook in police custody, the refurbished Timmy returned to his job at WHIZ-TV, and put his killer robot ways behind him.

Well, for the most part...

Moloko - Are 'Friends' Electric? (from Random: A Tribute to Gary Numan, 1997) - The sleazy side of future shock.

The Gymslips - Robot Man (from a 1983 single; collected on Rockin' with the Renees: The Punk Collection, 2000) - Not to be confused with the Scorpions track (covered by The Expoxies on Stop the Future) with the same name, this is an infectious piece of punky retro-pop by a quartet of hard-partying British lasses.

(panels taken from Captain Marvel Adventures #125 and #136.)

Albums That Meant Something - Part 5 - Dreams of Last Year's Heroes

This poster, hung over the foot of my bed, is what I woke up to every morning for the better part of a decade. It's the backside of the poster-sized cover to The Feeding of the 5000, Crass's 1978 debut.

As I've mentioned in previous installments of this series, I came into punk rock at a time when the scene was at a low ebb, reduced to isolated individuals and small knots of like-minded enthusiasts. Historical documentation and available material was thin on the ground.

Occasionally one might come across some second-hand books or music mags or a rare affordable treasure in the used vinyl bins, but for the most part it was a trial-and-error journey through uncharted territory when it came to discovering stuff outside the Clash/Pistols/Ramones/Dead Kennedys back-catalogues...or the hardcore scene, which had had taken a bad turn towards the metallic. Hard-won and incomplete information about bands or styles or whatnot was passed by word of mouth or the occasional expensive leap of import-record buying faith.

In the spring of 1992, I was a twenty year old enthusiast of 80's Britpunk and Oi with a studded leather jacket and a crest of purple hair done up Misfits style. It was stock template punrockerdom -- aggro posturing, meticulous accessorizing, and provocative (if a tad tired) fashionizing -- and I say that without making excuses for or condemning my younger self. It's all part of being young, but even then I was feeling a bit long in the tooth for the game and with little idea where it was all going to lead.

Then I discovered Crass.

I'm not certain what it was that convinced me to give the seminal anarchopunks a listen. Patches, badges and jacket paintings featuring the band's distinctive symbols and slogans were commonly enough spotted around the scene, though the same applied to Discharge, and I never warmed to their stuff. It was more likely my insatiable hunger for material to listen to, combined with my reading some reviews for Crass gigs (written in painfully earnest anarcho-communist jargon) in some old fanzines I found. In any case, I ended up picking up a copy of Best Before 1984, a 1986 retrospective of the band's career, at In Your Ear on Commonwealth Avenue sometime in the late spring of 1992.

It was the most terrifying thing I had ever listened to.

It was twenty tracks -- taken from the band's singles and topped off with a live cut from their final performance -- of hardcore anarchist politics delivered over crude tribal punk riffs and occasionally garnished with experimental sonic effects. Protest music (or political music in general) is an iffy proposition, as the proper mix of art and ideology is difficult to achieve.

Crass never aimed for a proper balance, and let the musical aesthetics take a back seat to the message. Yet on the best of their efforts, the sheer force of their convictions elevates the material past the level of noisy agitprop. Whether on "Reality Asylum," a scathing spoken word attack on religion, or the more traditionally punky "Big A Little A," about non-violent resistance, the sense of outrage is visceral, palpable, and chilling in a way no cartoony shock value nonsense could ever hope to match.

More so than the music, it was the concepts behind the Crass collective that struck a chord with me during that transitional period. The theories, manifestos and explanations -- packed in as booklets with Best Before and Christ: The Album -- concerning the punk movement, anarchism, pacifism, and activism influenced me greatly even if I didn't entirely agree with their views on politics and human nature. (I'd love to think a society could work on the basis of voluntary cooperation alone, but harsh experience has taught me otherwise, and no amount of utopian cheerleading is going to change that.)

It got me to thinking about what my priorities were as a self-identified punk rocker, which I realized meant more than an elaborate hairstyle and dogmatic adherence to genre orthodoxy...which was great, because I've saved a ton of cash since I've quit buying ultra-super-hold hair gel and Cockney Rejects bootleg live albums.

Here are two of my favorite selections from Best Before 1984. The first, originally from a 1980 split single with the Poison Girls, is a pointed rejection of letting the ends justify the means. The second, taken from a 1982 EP, is a sandblast of vituperative anti-militarism which brought down the impotent wrath of Parliament. (An edited news clip about the controversy precedes the track.)

Crass - Bloody Revolutions

Crass - Sheep Farming in the Falklands

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.

even though we ain't got protoculture

Setting the mood, the Mekton II way...

...and if they don't, then they really need to.

Or if that's too unorthodox a concept to countenance, perhaps you could stretch the boundaries laterally, and gird your loins for dice-and-tables mecha combat with the stirring sounds of "Danny's Song" or the theme to Footloose. Michael McDonald's discography also makes excellent music to swing double photon sabers to.

Me First & The Gimme Gimmes - Danny's Song (from Have a Ball, 1997) - Cutting the soft rock toxicity to non-fatal, yet still uncomfortable levels.

As for me, however, there is only one track worthy enough to accompany my desperate fight against the sinister forces of the Comet Empire...

Mongo Santamaria - Watermelon Man (from Watermelon Man, 1962) - Jazz standard cartridge -- LOADED! Conga capacitors -- CHARGED TO MAX! On my mark, prepare to unleash the power of the LATIN BOOGALOO CANNON!

reductio ad pussycat

The irrefutable shame-based ontology of Josie McCoy, as applied to the question of burps and invisible dogs:

Fig. 1: Burps are invisible.
Fig. 2: Burps exist.
Fig. 3: Visual evidence is not the sole criteria for determining the existence of a given phenomena.
Fig. 4: Therefore, invisible dogs must exist.
New Order - Denial (from Movement, 1981) - Where subjectivity fails.

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.

nobody's sorry

If the recent events in the Twin Cities have had a certain mephitic familiarity to them, well....


They aren't without precedent.

Oh, I'm sorry. Was that offsides? Too fucking bad.

Yes, the G.O.P. hasn't advocated the liquidation of undesirables...openly, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other parallels.

Claiming a monopoly on patriotism and love of country? Check.

Demonizing the opposition as traitors? Check.

Claiming alliance with the clean-leaving regular folks against the decadent elites? Check.

Stressing ignorance as a virtue? Check.

Sporting perpetual hard-ons for any and all things militaristic? Check.

Emphasis on creepy, necrophiliac rituals of martyrdom? Check.

Led by a jumped up ex-military man with a bad temper and hatful of hollow promises to win the masses over even as he plans to fuck them over? Check.

Still, I suppose that as long as folks aren't being shipped off to death camps, the rest of the disturbing similarties can be overlooked, especially if the bootheel to come rests more heavily on someone else's neck, be they women, gays, blacks, latinos, liberals, foreigners, and the like.

Subway Sect - Nobody's Scared (from a 1978 single) - The death rattle of rationality. I've said it before (in the context of the Dead Kennedys music): When the situation on the ground rivals -- nay, exceeds the most paranoiac of punk prophecies, then we're in dire straits indeed, comrades.

Edit: Before the anonymous faces in the peanut gallery again decide for some cheap point-scoring, I'd just like to say that Godwin's Law can go fuck itself.

strange encounter

In a world where Super-Dads can't understand their Super-Sons....

"Don't blame me, son. Blame Trojan."
...and Super-Sons can't understand their Super-Dads...

Tennessee Williams presents Bat on a Hot Tin Roof!
...there is a place committed to bridging the Super-Generation Gap; a place called...

ENOYREVE
Pronounce it however you like; Enoyreve is a judgement-free zone. (But please spell the name correctly on the check for the non-refundable admission fee. Our accountant is a real hard-ass.)

You will be placed under the singular guidance of resident guru Dr. Timothy Zamm...

Fashions by Desaad, hairstyle by Oliver Queen
...a disciple of Master Bob Haney who has earned non-degree certificates from some of finest community colleges and correspondence schools in the Tri-State area.

Zamm's unique approach to family therapy includes such visionary techniques such as meditative beard-stroking, full immersion bikini sessions of "light as a feather, stiff as a board," as well as the Connery method of backhand faceslapping...

...and later, "White Night" drills and free Kool-Aid for everybody!
...all designed to challenge one's preconceptions in the most uncomfortable manner imaginable.

Subtext, what...ah, you know the drill...
If the Funky Robot group dance sessions or the Joe Besser-inspired pinching encounters...

Therapy or fetish? Only Dr. Zamm knows, and he's keeping it under his dashiki.
...fail to achieve the necessary breakthrough, our radical "killer-android-armed-with-nerve-gas" therapy...

"I respect that it's your thing, brother, but your toxic death cloud is decidedly unmellow."
...is available to those who wish to take things to a higher level. Nothing inspires a little father-son bonding like some rogue WMDs. (They don't even have to be real ones, either. Just ask the Bushes.)

ENOYREVE -- committed to bringing Super-Families together since 1974. Don't take out word for it; listen to the testimonial by these satisfied seekers of Super-Enlightenment...

...and then the acid kicked in.
Sponsored by World's Finest Comics #224 (July-August 1974), purchased by a young Andrew for 35 cents at a local flea market. Some childhood traumas will never heal, no matter how much masculine dance or pinch therapy one undergoes.

The Wipers - No Generation Gap (from Over the Edge, 1983) - In a fair world, The Wipers would be more than a source of esoteric namedropping by music geeks or a reliable source of cover song material. It's not that the Portland indie rockers are particularly unappreciated as they're underappreciated, mentioned with reverence but never reaching the same levels of fan devotion as many other less-worthy objects of college radio worship.

The Ramones - Psycho Therapy (from Subterranean Jungle, 1983) - I got a chance to see The Ramones when they played at (the now long-gone) Citi in the December of 1990. I spent most of the evening in the company of the most annoying twerp ever to crack open a Dungeon Master's Guide. The club was packed with jocks from Boston University who wanted to check out "that mosh pit shit" and my spectacles were smashed during the course of the festivities.

Afterwards, I had to walk a mile in the snow from Mishuam Station to my home. A shitty experience all around, but I did get to see The Ramones play live and up close, which made the plague of hassles entirely worthwhile.

pretty spider for a white guy

Super Lumina failed state inspection last Friday because of a safety issue (for a busted indicator and quite possibly the retractable titanium steel ramming spike I mounted on the bumper). Normally this would be the type of thing I'd have fixed on the spot, but because I waited until the last minute, the mechanic didn't have the parts or time to take care of it. I had to settle for a rejection sticker and an appointment to bring it in for repairs and a retest this morning.

I originally picked this particular garage (back in 2001) because it located a couple blocks from where I was living at the time, which meant I could drop my car off, walk home, and goof off around the house until it was time to pick up and pay. They also happened to be honest, affordable, and extremely good at their work -- an extremely rare combination -- and I continued to go there even after I moved to the Woburn Highlands on the far southern edge of the city.

The previous drill of "drop off and walk home" was slightly adjusted to "walk to my grandma's house (my former residence), and beg a ride home and back." This time around, though, no ride was offered, and I was too self-conscious about my present Worst Grandson Ever^TM status (passively earned, just so no one gets the wrong idea about my particular flavor of crapulence) to ask for one. So I ended up spending most of the day in my grandma's living room and attic, digging out and reading comics from the dozen or so longboxes I've yet to bring up the House on the Hillside and drinking Dixie cup after Dixie cup of watery fruit punch.

Most of the stuff was from the 1990's and early 2000's, and I was amazed at how many comics I bought and continued buy even after any sane rationale for reading a title slipped away -- Peter David's coyly smug Captain Marvel relaunch, Erik Larsen's Defenders relaunch, Mark Millar's Authority run, Devin Grayson's Titans. Chalk it up to collector's inertia, a noxious habit I'm glad to have since kicked to the curb.

There were also some relatively entertaining things I purchased and subsequently forgot about due to the high volume of incoming crap, and these were how I passed the long hours of my captivity in the Land of Bleach and Doilies -- Garth Ennis's War Story comics and his Enemy Ace: War in Heaven miniseries, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, Avengers/JLA (a.k.a. JLA/Avengers) , and John Byrne's run(s) on Sensational She-Hulk.

It was the latter that provided the most enjoyment, not for the playful (if a bit heavy on the meta gags) romp through the Marvel Universe's z-list which made me miss the old, good John Byrne, but for this editorial page illustration from issue #41 (July 1992):


There is a transcendental cosmic truth to be found within its majesty, providing that one has the strength of will to embrace it without descending into existential madness.

Flesh For Lulu - Restless (from Flesh For Lulu, 1984) - "Gothic rock" is a rather subjective term.
Polysics - Making Sense (from Neu, 2003) - I think we're well past any chance of that happening. Better to just ride the Japanese noise rock whirwind and see where it leads us.

the banality of sadism

A week or so back, the wife and I made one last trip to the local comics and used book store's basement "all for a dollar" room before its closure. As it was the last hurrah for the beloved place where we've bought hundreds of cheap vintage paperbacks over the years, we went a little crazy scooping up anything remotely of interest, be it genre classics, trashy potboilers, or even honest-to-snobbery literature.

I used the opportunity to buy a lot of books I ought to have read or owned but never gotten around to acquiring, as well as large number of works that fell within the "guilty pleasures" and "modest curiosity" categories (like Graham Masterton's Famine, a Mork and Mindy photonovel, and the novelization of Moon Zero Two). I also nabbed a copy of Splatter Punks, a 1990 anthology of "extreme horror" released by St. Martin's Press in 1990.

It was something I'd seen on the shelf during many a previous visit, but even the markdown from a fiver to a buck hadn't been enough to convince me to get off the fence...especially since the stories by the two authors I liked, Clive Barker and Joe R. Landsale, had been anthologized in other books I already owned. Considering this was my last chance to pick it up as an impulse purchase, though, I figured I might as well blow the four quarters and just buy the damn thing.

It turned out to be exactly what I expected -- not quite good, but not quite terrible either. I'm less than keen on the tendency to coin new subgenre by adding the "-punk" suffix. When "cyberpunk" was coined in the early 1980's it made an excellent descriptor for William Gibson's blend of street-level aesthetics and science-fiction. The problem was that once the designated subgenre was coined, a slew of imitators -- some good, most downright dire -- rushed in to create works that fit the form from creative inception. (I've toyed doing a series of posts titled "Bad Cyberpunk," but shelved the idea when I realized that I'd have to reread most of the works in the process.)

From that one seed a thousand subgenres (and microgenres) were born -- steampunk, cybergothic, Edwardian-punk, biopunk, postcyberpunk, ribofunk, and so forth -- in a process of marketing most fractal. Splatterpunk was one of the early adopters, coined in the mid-1980's in reference to the works of Clive Barker (and it always comes back to Barker) and other writers of "visceral," as opposed to "suggestive," horror fiction.

So what, you may be asking, does that really mean? According to "Outlaws", a manifesto written by Paul M. Sammon, editor of Splatter Punks:

Well...first remove the limits society and so-called good taste place on fiction. All the limits. Add a healthy dose of shock as well as the influence of schlock movies, late-night TV, and the screaming guitar licks of the world's greatest heavy-metal band.

Finally, stir in a strong awareness of of pop culture. Season with a no bullshit attitude. Serve up some of the best writing in the field today.

Oh, dear. He's not kidding about the lack of restraint, at least as it pertains to the hard sell hyperbole. The thing is, and Sammon even mentions this in his essay, that graphically violent horror fiction is hardly a new phenomenon, even by 1990 standards. Richard Matheson's Hell House, the works of Stephen King and James Herbert, and scores of potboliers penned in the 1970's made ample use of over-the-top sex and gore to spice things up. Clive Barker's Books of Blood weren't revolutionary for their luridness, but for the author's unique approach to the genre, which presents a mix of mythic and mundane akin to the South American "magical realist" school of fiction.

In the absence of a similar sense of creative vision, most of the stories in Splatter Punks resort to the twin banalities of popcult namedropping and casual brutality to propel the thinnest of narrative gruel. The marriage of high concepts and cheap thrills is a perfectly workable one, but it's not revolutionary, nor is it necessarily worthy of a distinct genre tag...apart from the marketability such a thing brings with it. The fact that many of the anthology's featured authors either flat out reject the splatterpunk label or treat it with noticible ambivalence is telling.

There's also a distinct defensive tone to the Sammon's advocacy, directed at the traditionalists then in nominal charge of the "scene" as well as toward the critics' concern about the misogynist subtext present in many of the works. Even a story like John Skipp's "Film at Eleven," presented as an rebuttal to those concerns, comes off as as rather disingenuous, a spin on The Burning Bed that manages to undermine its own message for the sake of some predictable shock value.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" does a far better job at balancing social awareness and graphic violence -- imagine To Kill a Mockingbird directed by George Romero -- but Lansdale is one of the author's who refused to self-identify with the splatterpunk label. Douglas E. Winters's "Less Than Zombie" purports to send up the morally apathetic protagonists of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, but the end results read less like pointed satire than a straight excerpt from the hundred or so pages cut from the final draft of Ellis's novel.

Overheated boasts about relevance and transgressive power aside, it takes more than a meticulously detailed description of stabbing or scatalogically-vivid purple prose to legitimately break genre boundaries in a manner that doesn't reek adolescent posturing.

Rubicon - Watch Without Pain (from What Starts, Ends, 1992) - Acceptable, if not especially inspired, gothic rock with ties to the far superior Fields of the Nephilim.

My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (from Loveless, 1991) - Yet deep enough to submerge the Himalayas....

choose wisely or perish

The dreaded return of Senator Psycho Man -- because there is no gag I can't milk 'till the udders squirt dust!

(with apologies this time to Fantastic Four #284, November 1985)
I came of age in the era of home videogame consoles -- first the Pong clones, then the Atari age, the Nintendo generation, and all that followed. Before one was old enough to secure a source of disposable income, the purchase of a system was left in the hands of parents or relatives, either directly or through gifts of cash. It was crucially important to choose wisely and get the "right" system, lest one be stuck with a big pile of digitized suck while one's peers waxed euphoric about the console not taken.

It hurts to feel left out of the loop, especially when you're a kid and can't put things right via a high-interest credit card purchase. Humans being the adaptable creatures that we are, though, it was a simple enough matter to encyst the nagging feelings of envy by adopting an irrationaly defensive attitude...

My system doesn't suck, yours does! If you look at the specs, the Atari 7800 is far superior to the NES, and Solaris beats that stupid Super Mario bullshit any day! I wouldn't get a Nintendo even if they were giving them out for free! Quit laughing!

Repeat it often enough, and you might even come to believe it...even if in your heart of hearts you know the real truth. This midset, I suspect, is why videogame fandom tends to outstrip all others when it comes to twisted loyalty and bizarre outburts.

Substituting brand loyalty for community isn't anything new; it's an inevitable consequence of consumer capitalist society where traditional bonds of community have long been on the wane. Unlike, say, the Marvel versus DC fan rivalry, however, the cost of switch-hitting between factions is a hundred times more expensive, making the face-saving justifications that much more strident and impassioned.

I bring this up because I'm reminded of it each time I stumble across defenses of Sarah Palin's vice-presidential credentials issued by various right-wing pundits and the GOP's official PR flacks. It's rather pathetic watching the loyal unconvinced contort themselves through the most tenuous (even by political standards) chains of logic in order to justify an unjustifiable position. Palin is a foreign policy expert because the Japanese occupied the Aluetian Islands during the Second World War? Seriously? There's wishful thinking, and there's outright delusional psychosis.

Even more entertaining is how the justifications double back upon and contradict the previously prevailing rhetoric:

Experience matters, except when it doesn't. Oh, I mean a different kind of experience. Okay, look, I'm a fucking shill who will claim the moon is made of cheese if the party bosses say it will help their chances.

It's also great that the self-appointed arbiters of "traditional Christian morality" have managed to dig some Christian forebearance and compassion out of their junk drawers when it comes to Palin's unwed teenage daughter. "These things happen." Indeed they do, but will this new-found magnamity be extended to all...or just the certain politically expedient few?

Anyway you slice it, McCain's choice of Palin was a poor one. If it was done to shore up the support from social conservatives, there were plenty of better choices from which to pick. If it was done as an appeal to women voters and disillusioned Hillary supporters, there were several far more convincing and qualified options out there. It appears that there are many in the McCain camp who feel the same way, as the speed and ferocity of its responses to criticism -- such as bring up Doris Kearns Goodwin's political affiliation after she stated the historical fact that Palin's resume is the thinnest in the past hundred years of presidential elections -- rivals the defensive rants of any ten-year old who got a TurboGrafx-16 instead of a SNES for Christmas.

(I suspect that McCain's real motivation for going with Palin was because his ego would not allow for a second power base within the presidency -- see Dick "Richelieu" Cheney -- and that factored first above any other considerations.)

Any Trouble - Second Choice (from Where Are All the Nice Girls? 1980) - The Wikipedia entry for Any Trouble states that the band suffered from "unfair" comparisons to Elvis Costello. Unfair, perhaps, because it failed to mentioned the similarities to Squeeze as well.

Deadbeats - Choose You (from a 1980 single) - Not the L.A. punk rockers of "Kill the Hippies" fame, these Deadbeats were a British mod revival outfit. It's all good to me.

soon you'll all be singing along

(with the deepest of apologies to 1967's Fantastic Four Annual #5)
Pulp - The Fear (This Is Hardcore, 1998) - Of the unknown? Hardly. I know all too well what I'm afraid of happening on the fourth of November. Not even crash infusions of sublime Britpop can ease my anxieties.

Count Five - Psychotic Reaction (from Psychotic Revelation, 2003) - Superlative garage rock doesn't help, either, though not from lack of trying.

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.

Friday Night Fights: Rush 'N' Attack

It's friday night, cats and kittens, which means it's time for a little realpolitik action with Black Canary, Master of International Diplomacy!

(from Justice League #3, July 1987; by Giffen, DeMatteis, Maguire & Gordon)
Now that's what I call détente....

The Dents - Not Through with You (from Time for Biting, 2006) - Up for some kickass parochial punk rawk? Maura caught them performing at a Boston Derby Dames a couple years back and their album has been on heavy houshold rotation ever since.