roll for critical fumble

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orange Juice:

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

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

Oingo Boingo:

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

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

Conflict:

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

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

Pet Shop Boys:

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

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

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

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.

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....

hungry so angry

Yesterday a friend asked me "Why'd you pick 'Armagideon Time' for your blog's name?" When I decided to create whatever-the-heck-this-site-is back in the spring of 2006, there was a short list of potential names I considered using. All but one, "The Land of Clear Blue Radio" (after The Soviettes' song), were Clash-related, in honor of the high regard in which I hold for the "only band that mattered."

"Capitol Radio One," "Gates of the West," "The Right Profile" were all worthy contenders, but none felt or sounded as perfect as "Armagideon Time." Apart from being the title of an outstanding track (whether one is referring to the Willie Williams or Clash version), it also dovetailed nicely with my own personal infatuation with things apocalyptic and foreboding. It's not a religious thing with me, but a legacy of childhood anxieties that I have carried with me into adulthood.

From the depressing extrapolations of 1970's sci-fi to the nuclear dread of the Reagan Era, my formative years were spend bathing in a popcultural spring of visions of the End Times, presented as an inevitable occurrence though the actual vector of Armageddon (nuclear war, ecological collapse, revolt by intelligent apes) varied from source to source. There is something I find fascinating in apocalyptic flights of fancy -- they way they speak to the collective anxieties of an given era/culture as well as the vicarious thrill of watching the human species choke on its own excessive folly or come up short against uncaring entropy.

If there's a sincere cautionary message, it's usually so overdressed in sensationalism or hyperbole that it devolves into unintentional parody, a trite moral to justify the big draw of the spectacle itself. Or else it merely emphasizes a small-but-dramatic part of the big picture over the little details, the ones with real-life significance.

I recently came away from a trip to the local comics and used book store with a plastic grocery bag full of old paperback sci-fi and horror novels. My haul, which set me back all of twelve dollars, was evenly split between works of relative quality by the likes of Huxley and Spinrad and number of volumes of "catastrophe porn." I use the term "porn" rather loosely (though not inaccurately, as we shall see) to differentiate these dubiously prophetic potboilers from the blanket term of "disaster fiction" coined and thoughfully analyzed by Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear.

Unlike Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the apocalyptic elements in catastrophe porn are not integrated backdrops for an actual narrative, but in fact supercede whatever thin narrative might exist. Characterization and plot serve as skeletal frameworks from which to hang the series of sensational vignettes which are the real selling point of such works. It's not about whether or not Chuck Heston will reconcile with Eva Gardner -- it's about watching L.A. collapse into rubble and anarchy.

Here's a excerpt from the back cover of the 1981 Ace Charter edition of Graham Masterton's Famine, an excellent example of the subgenre which also happeded to be the first of the stack I pulled out to read:


Hilarious, offensive, and informative!

There is something of a plot in Famine. A big city actuary turned Kansas farmer and his Manhattan-loving wife find their existence turned upside down by a multi-pronged assault on America's food supply. While corrupt and/or politicians attempt to exploit or acknowledge the situation, the country falls into a state of complete anarchy. The mystery of who caused the crisis doesn't so much unfold as pop out like a built-in turkey thermometer. (Is it the Soviets? Who could it be but the Soviets? Maybe it isn't the Soviets? But who, if not the Soviets? Yep, it's the Soviets. Oh, well.)

Really, though, it's a lot of wheel-spinning in anticipation of the juicy parts, little lurid nuggets describing all manner of horrors unleashed by the disaster.

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, twenty men and one woman tried to break into a supermarket and steal boxes of canned meat, vegetables, and fruit. They were almost through loading when they were surprised by a National Guard patrol who machine-gunned all of them with warning. Their bodies were littered across the parking lot, and a reporter for the Herald-Bulletin of Tulsa said, "There was so much blood it was gurgling down the storm drains like crimson bathwater."

It's a veritable pagent of graphically-described murders, looting, riots, and a disturbing amount of rape, including one scene that surpasses anything from American Psycho for sheer "what the fuck is wrong with this author?" vileness). Ample lashings of sex and ultra-violence are the order of the day, resulting in something akin to a non-racist* version of Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries, apolitical save for the pithy observation that the American people overconsume, are overentitled, and are prone to violence.

Gee, I never noticed.

Masterton writes in a style reminiscent of James Herbert's, which is essentially a stripped down version of Stephen King's style with the sensationalism cranked to the highest setting. It certainly fits the level of the material, though lines such as this one...

"You've been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I've been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day."

...and not recall the painful days of one's freshman creative writing class.

Famine is utter crap, but utter crap that greasily fulfills its purpose as a disposable, sleazy read which capitalizes on the fears of privation felt by a society that had recently experienced several shortages of essential goods. Yeah, I know, it seems so quaint and silly from a present-day perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take out a second mortgage so I can gas up the car and buy a loaf of bread.

Willie Williams - Armagideon Time (from Armagideon Time, 1979) - Back to the roots.

Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor - Theme from Green Acres (from Television's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, 1990) - Ever want to see an episode of Green Acres where Oliver was seduced by a busty double agent working to cultivate a corrupt senator as the puppet leader of a future Soviet-occupied and famine-ravaged America? If so, then I have book suggestion for you.

*The book does mention that black looters were more violent than white ones in the initial wave of food riots, but by the end everyone has sunk to the same level of lawless behavior, though white L.A. residents are singled out as being especially monstrous. It's not hard to deduce the book's target audience.

Vacation 2008: Day 5 - Objectivist hygiene

I've been slowly working my way through Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a very well-written examination of the legendary comics creator's life and body of work. Bell does an outstanding job of addressing not only Ditko's unique sense of aesthetics, but also the man's fiercely Objectivist philosophy and personal eccentricities, and their effect on his artistic style and professional career.

Nowhere is Ditko's evangelism for the Ayn Rand school of petty selfishness "enlightened self-interest" so fervent and unrestrained as in 1973's The Avenging World. Not so much a work of sequential art as a bizarre illustrated primer espousing Rand's political theories in the most lurid, brute-force method imaginable, The Avenging World reads like a Chick tract adaptation of Atlas Shrugged set in the Dread Dormammu's Dark Dimension -- entertainingly bat-shit in the way only an embarrassingly sincere and personal project by a talented eccentric can be.

That doesn't mean that reading The Avenging World is anything other than a tough slog through repetitive dissertations -- in comic strip, illustrated text, and infographic format -- on the primacy of "rational self-interest" over collective obligation. I trend toward the left-libertarian/anarcho-communist side of things myself, but I temper my views with liberal doses of cynical pragmatism. The uncompromising rightist Objectivism in The Avenging World refuses to partition the "is" from the "ought," which is why the ideology tends to be in practice more justification than aspiration. "A = A" is an abstraction, and as such, is a hollow mantra in a world where the messy and inconclusive are commonplace.

Swap out the abstract for the concrete, and the philosophical scenarios presented in The Avenging World would go something like this...

Ideological purity is no substitute for a can of Ajax and some elbow grease.

New Order - Age of Consent (from Power, Corruption, & Lies, 1983) - A musical selection whose sublime and fragile beauty I trust we can all agree upon.

guys and dolls

There are few things as disappointing as having a decent concept spoiled by an iffy personal agenda. Conn and Hal Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys, an attempt to enlighten the Playstation generation about the "lost" wisdom of folkways of yore, is the type of book that ought to appeal to me, yet comments made by the authors regarding the intent of the omnibus have left me loath to purchase a copy.

As a dilettante retrologist, I have a keen appreciation for efforts to preserve and present the fascinating parts of our collective cultural history that have fallen by the wayside, but it's that gender-specific qualifier, "for boys," that makes me pause. In the author's Amazon Q&A section, Conn Iggulden states, "You only have to push a boy on a swing to see how much enjoys the thrill of danger. It's hard-wired." It's a statement that smacks of biological determinism, and when placed alongside his complaints about raising a risk-adverse generation, suggests that the intent behind the book was not just about preserving vanishing folk wisdom, but an attempt to resurrect a mythicized version of traditional "rugged" masculinity, "snips and snails and puppy dog tails" versus "sugar and spice."

Which is bullshit, quite frankly. Bullshit which stems from reactionary discontent with modern liberal society and the gradual erosion of traditional gender roles. It's the same impulse that launched countless self-indulgent whines about "Daddy issues" and has created a thriving industry purposed to sell synthetic -- and quite depressing -- iterations of manliness to rubes convinced that they're missing out on something vital. I can empathize with those feeling a hunger of wholeness, but the idea that gender roles or a sense of personal identity can be purchased like a tin of shoe polish is wrongheaded for so many reasons.

While I've made an active effort to forget most of what I learned from my father on the subject of "what it is to be a man," there is one thing that has stuck with me. In reference to the manly-man gastronomic polemic Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, my father stated "Real men eat whatever the fuck they feel like." It's similar in sentiment to the Bard's "to thy own self be true," though with the additional benefit of some casual profanity, and if one changes "real men" to the gender-neutral "real individuals" it still applies in force.

You only have to push a child on a swing to see how much he or she enjoys the thrill of danger. It's hard-wired into children, period. Or not. Some kids are thrillseekers and others are cautious. It's a matter of temperament, not of sex, though the encouragement or discouragement of such traits is often shaped by the semi-transparent hand of gender role socialization (which is a damn shame). Rather than thinking that something has been lost because of the socio-cultural shifts regarding gender, it's more productive -- not to mention better for the theoretical child in question -- to embrace the wider vistas of self-expression and opportunity that have been opened.

So I think I'll pass on picking up The Dangerous Book for Boys. It would be a redundant purchase, anyhow, considering that I already have a few volumes of this, handed down to me by my mother, at my disposal:

(click for maximum edification)
That's the first half of the contents page for the third volume of The Book of Knowledge, 1951 edition. Part encyclopedia, part almanac, part DIY handbook -- it's the real deal, as opposed to a post-facto nostalgic recreation. Check out the range of subjects covered, all targeted toward the eight-to-twelve year olds of six decades ago. Something has been lost in the past half-century, but it has fuck all to do with presence of absence of a Y chromosome.

Mechanical Servants - Study Up! (from the Min X Match 12", 1980; collected on several bootleg minimal synth compilations) - A little bit of digging about the Mechanical Servants reveals that they were a female minimal synth duo that hailed from New York and their 1980 EP was released as a private pressing, though copies of the record can be found for quite reasonable prices (under $20) on eBay and elsewhere.

London Underground - Train of Thought (from a 1981 single; collected on the Atomic Shockwaves v. 13 compilation) - This one sounds a little like an early Killing Joke track...if said track was being broadcast by a failing automated low-power transmitter half a decade after a global thermonuclear exchange.

Yeah, I'm in a minimal synth/postpunk mood tonight. What of it?

tuned to a dead channel

Despite the large and ever-growing number of unread books in my collection, whenever I'm at a loss about what to read next I invariably gravitate to something chosen from a short list of well-loved favorites. The criteria for being part of that elect group of books isn't so much a matter of importance or literary merit, but rather stems from my personal and empirical experience as a reader. To put it simply, they are books I never tire of re-reading.

The list includes The Great Gatsby, The Loved One, Kidnapped, Raymond Chandler's "Phillip Marlowe" novels, Len Deighton's "Spy With No Name" books, Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy -- all read and re-read many times over with no signs of diminishing returns on their entertainment value. Also high up on the list is a novel I recently had the pleasure of revisiting and plan on discussing a little in today's post, William Gibson's Neuromancer.

The 1984 novel codified, if not created, the template for the "cyberpunk" genre, a hyper-stylized blending of noir and hard-sci elements with an emphasis on technology -- particularly cybernetics, computer/information science, and genetic engineering -- fraying the boundaries between man and machine. Many of the concepts and constructs presented in Neuromancer have since been appropriated into the popcultural fabric (and in the case of the virtual realm of the cyberspace, into reality), imitated and replicated to point of cliche. The novel's astonishing degree of influence makes it difficult to discuss properly in the space of a couple-hundred word blog post (or even a doctoral thesis), so in keeping with the micro-subjective spirit of Armagideon Time, I'm just going to indulge in some personal musings on the subject.

Like all works of sci-fi, Neuromancer is a product of its time, in this instance, the early 1980's, when the dying gasps of consensus-driven progress where drowned out by rushing sound of upwardly concentrating wealth and power and a the bleep-bloop din of revolutions in personal electronics and computing. It was a time when style was knowingly but unironically embraced over substance, which is reflected in the techno-lyricism of Gibson's prose, in passages such as this one...

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move too quickly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market...

...which make me despair over my own limitations as a writer. Chrome and surgically-fitted mirrorshades, the radiant geometric purity of cyberspace and the entropic grime of the east coast Sprawl -- the world of Neuromancer took its stylistic cues from both edges of the zeitgeist's blade.

That's not to say that the novel is a disposable exercise in superficiality. It is, at its core, an entertaining sci-fi take on the classic heist story, with Case the "Console Cowboy" and razorgirl Molly drawn into a fractally complicated job with tremendous ramifications. Gibson is adept at integrating the stylistic and technical flourishes into the novel as a whole.

This, and the moral ambiguity of the protagonists allows the author to indirectly offer socio-cultural insights without tipping over into the realm of techno-parable. Entertain, then edify. A common mistake made by other writers with aspirations of following in Gibson's thematic footsteps is to simply crib the superficial trappings of the cyperpunk genre, and use them as window-dressing for formulaic sci-fi material, swapping out the bubble helmets and bug-eyed aliens for cybernetic enhancements and monolithic corporations.

I read Neuromancer (and occasionally its two sequels) once every couple of years or so, and each time I do the novel's vision of the future seems that much more quaint, a retro-futurist cul-de-sac of "could have, but didn't." (Something Gibson himself has acknowledged in the intro to Virtual Light, a more up-to-date -- yet also dated -- novelistic spin on cyberpunk themes.) Oddly enough, the novel's increasingly dated vision of the shape of things to come is one of the major reasons I've become so fond of the book -- nostalgia for an anticipated future that never came to pass.

"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a large hand through close cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."

See, I thought "Screamin' Fist" was the a-side of The Viletones' 1977 debut 7"...

The Viletones - Screamin' Fist - Somewhere around here I have a 1978 issue of Creem which covers the Sex Pistols' American tour and subsequent break-up. One of the short news blurbs in the front of the magazine mentions The Viletones, specifically the announcement by the Canadian punk band's lead singer, Nazi Dog, that he planned to kill himself on stage during an upcoming show. I wonder how that worked out for him?

Rational Youth - City of Night (from Cold War Night Life, 1982) - The "punk" aspect of cyberpunk wasn't a musical reference so much as shorthand for the genre's street-level grittiness and its "underground" sensibility, which dovetailed into the popular perception of the 80's punk subculture.

My synesthetic soundtrack when reading cyperpunk fiction runs toward the New Romantic end of the spectrum, though I admit that "cybersynthpop" lacks a certain ring to it.

he's the man of the hour

It is only natural, I suppose, when recovering from a prolonged physical ordeal that one's thoughts would take a pronounced turn toward the introspective. During my slow convalescence, I have frequently found myself pondering roads not taken. My meditations have centered on matters as small as my habitual negligence regarding flossing, as well as grander existential questions about my ultimate purpose in life.

It occurred to me that maybe my talents were not best served in my current dual occupation of paid techmonkey/unpaid internet commentator, and that I could obtain a greater sense of personal fulfillment through a career in the European supercriminal field. There is visceral sense of satisfaction to be obtained in wrecking the economies of several Continenal powers through an overly elaborate scheme involving disintegration rays and amphibious cars. It's certainly a superior experience than explaining to my coworkers (for the umpteenth time) why downloading spyware-laden clutterware onto the department server is a bad thing.

One of the problems for the aspiring Euro supercriminal is the shocking absence of any vocational training programs or graduate-level seminars from which to learn the tricks of the trade. Granted, there are MBA programs, but those skew toward the megalomaniacal world-destroyer career path, where I'm more interested in the anarcho-hedonist side of things. Not even the renowned University of Phoenix offers something as straightforward as an MFA in Creative Villainy. No wonder this country has lost its competitive edge.

Instead, I've had to content myself with reviewing the recorded careers of some of the past luminaries of the profession, and performing a comparative inventory of relevant assets to determine my potential prospects. Here's a brief annotated summary:

Vehicle: While a tan 1998 Chevy Lumina lacks the sex appeal of a 1962 Studebaker Avanti or 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, the sturdiness, the horsepower, and, most importantly, the aggressive unremarkableness of the mid-sized family sedan make it an ideal getaway car. A quick turn into a suburban subdivision during a frenetic chase would utterly perplex the local constabulary as they would be forced to deal with dozens of vehicular red herrings.

Nefarious Weapon: At hand.

Secret Lair: The house on the hill isn't so much "secret" as "relatively isolated," which gives it the benefit of "hiding in plain sight." Its interior is well stocked with electronic gadgets (including a Zune, a gaming PC, and an Xbox 360) and exotic pets (well, a couple of dogs, some cats, some rabbits, and a chinchilla). While there are no alligator pits or other sinister deathtraps per se, we do have a garage full of feral cats who can be quite peevish at times and there are some low pipes in the cellar capable of braining the unwary intruder.

Disguises: An essential skillset for a supercriminal to possess, and one that I have clearly mastered.

Female Assistant Partner: No problems there. Even better, she has a ruthlessness and facility for physical violence which I am altogether lacking.

Wardrobe: This one poses something of a problem. I lack the physique to properly fill out a skintight body suit. (Diabolik was able to carry off the look, but his svelte frame had definition and tone, while mine does not.) Masks, hoods, or dominoes are right out, too, as they wouldn't accessorize properly with my spectacles. (A monocle would be an ideal affectation -- especially if it incorporated integral sleep ray/x-ray vision functions -- but the need to constantly squint would play havoc with the depth perception.) Formal evening wear is classy, but too constricting, and lasting trauma from 70's childhood prevents me from ever donning another turtleneck pullover. The best option would be an all-black business casual ensemble with a collarless button-down shirt. It's stylish, breathable, and has enough flexibility should I need to leap from an overpass onto the top of a passing train.

Though it would appear that I am well-prepared for the switch in careers, there are still a few questions that I still need to resolve. For instance, how are the elaborate interconnected networks of victims, accomplices, foils, and dupes that every supercriminal needs to carry out his or her plan generated? Is it something expected to be in place prior to embarking on the career path? Does it organically emerge once one has begun? Or does it involve some pump priming on the part of the supercriminal to make sure that the rival mob bosses, spoiled countesses, and brilliant-yet-unlucky detectives assume their proper places within the grand scheme? (Not to mention the serendipitous extended relationships linking all the major players, like the countess's servant being the former girlfriend of the mob boss's son who is a colleague of the dedicated gendarme...)

Because, honestly, the whole high maintenance aspect seems suspiciously like work to me, and would dim the allure considerably should it be the case. Sleeping on a pile of ill-gotten banknotes doesn't feel the same if you're too knackered to properly enjoy it.

Finally, every sophisticated supercriminal worthy of the title needs to have some appropriate theme music. To this end, I have selected a ginchy double-bill of parochial punk and cosmopolitan cool to accompany my anticipated dastardly adventures.

Jerry's Kids - Spymaster (from Kill Kill Kill, 1989) - The best track on this late-in-the-decade offering by the local 80's hardcore legends, and it's a crunched-up cover of a La Peste song.

Georges Garvarentz - Le Temps Des Loups (from Shake Sauvage - French Soundtracks: 1968-1973, 2000) - The wolf is on the prowl, and he has brought a horn section and vibraphone to assist him in his predations.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to attempting to shape my usual hissing chuckle into something better befitting my new vocation.

everybody has cowlicks to conceal

Sad, but true: As the bright optimistic glare of the Atomic Age dispelled the lingering shadows of noir culture, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the very archetype of the hard boiled detective, found himself reduced to a pitchman for hair care products...

"When a man's supply of pomade is threatened, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference whether it uses a vegetable or mineral oil base."
"When I bury you underneath a dozen cases of Wildroot Cream-Oil^TM, you'll take it and like it. In fact, you love how it adds body to even the limpest locks."
"It smells nice, Sam. What is it?"
"The stuff that dreams -- and damn fine hairstyles -- are made of."

(from Captain Marvel Adventures #91; December 1948)
Hopefully the licensing royalites from the ad helped Dashiell Hammett defray the legal fees stemming from the Civil Rights Congress of New York (of which Hammett was chairperson) being labeled as a communist front organization by the Truman administration in 1947. The group's efforts to raise bail money for accused "subversives" and unwillingness to turn over the names of fund contributors to the government led to Hammett being found in contempt of court. After a similar refusal on his part to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee 1953, Hammett was blacklisted as well.

Quite a way to treat the man who gave the world both The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, yet there are plenty of folks out there who long for nothing more than a return to that lovely chapter of our history. Grand, ain't it?

You can find a handful of episodes of the old Sam Spade radio show for your downloading and listening enjoyment here. The Maltese Falcon, the 1930 novel featuring Sam Spade, is available (along with The Thin Man) as part of this handsomely-designed omnibus edition of Hammett's works. The equally indispensible 1941 film version can be found (with the racier pre-Code 1931 version and Satan Met a Lady, a 1936 comedic take starring Bette Davis) on this DVD set.

Duran Duran - Watching the Detectives (from Thank You, 1995) - Wonderfully wrong.

Adolph Deutsch - Theme to The Maltese Falcon (from Legendary Film Noir Movies, 2004) - Atmospherically right.

Ray Anthony & His Orchestra - Peter Gunn Theme (from The Ultra-Lounge Sampler, 1996) - A swinging delight.

the shadows still remain

Today is All Saints' Day (and before anyone asks, NO FUCKING WAY) which is as good a time as any to rediscover religion. I went looking for mine this morning, and it turned out to be up in the attic, packed in with a collection of failed hard drives and obsolete video cards in a box marked "unneeded junk."

Back when I used to work weekends at the college library, the portion of my shift that didn't involve playing "roust-a-pervert" or explaining to patrons that "no, this is not Boston University" was spent reading books and journal articles on whatever subject had captured my fancy at the moment. It's amazing how much one can learn from books when one knows there isn't a term paper or final exam at the end of the tunnel, and in terms of my educational development, I certainly came away from the experience with far more than I ended up getting from my actual college curriculum.

As I said, my choice of reading material was entirely whim-based, which led to some places that I would never have gotten to on my own. For example, I spent a couple shifts delving into St. Augustine's City of God, which despite my aggressive atheism turned out to be quite an engrossing read. It was written in the wake of the Visigoths' sack of Rome and is laden with spiritual-versus-earthly dualism (reflecting Augstine's own personal demons more than it does Christ's teachings). I was drawn to City of God by its apocalypticism, but in the end I found myself to be more fascinated by the implications of Augustine's detailed demolition of Roman pantheism, implications which the author himself could not bring himself to acknowledge.

A good-sized portion of the treatise is given over to an extended, almost god by god, refutation of the pagan and animist religious traditions practiced in the Empire at the time. Augustine strikes an almost mocking tone in these passages as he highlights the absurdities of having, for instance, separate deities for doors, frames, and lintels. It's as thorough an argument against irrational superstition as one can find, even if it doesn't entirely jibe with Augustine's intent, which was to posit the superiority of Judeo-Christian monotheism. The problem is that core elements of his arguments against pantheism -- the silliness, the contradictions, the twisted logic underpinning the system of belief -- can just as easily be applied to Augustine's own religious convictions, whose superiority in his mind is that God is more benevolent (which is a matter of practice, in truth), "real," and offers cool perks to His followers in the afterlife.

It's a common enough phenomenon whenever analytical philosophy collides with religious convictions. The same thing occurs in Descartes's Discourse on the Method, where, even when all other criteria for determining "self" are called into question, the existence of God is taken as an unassailable truth. It is as if having walked down to the shoreline of existentialism, Augustine, Descartes, and their philosophical and theological descendents cannot bring themselves to dip their toes in the water.

The Skids - The Saints Are Coming (from Scared to Dance, 1979) - It's a rare accomplishment for a song to survive being transformed into benefit porn by the likes of U2 and Green Day. Fortunately this bit of Scottish punk (co-written by the late Stuart Adamson, a member of The Skids before he went on to form Big Country) has bucked the odds and retained its ability to inspire awe in the listener despite having been used as a post-Katrina anthem and in an embarassingly preachy video.

What amuses me the most about that turn of events is that back in the old days, I used to describe The Skids to people by saying "they're kind of like U2...if U2 didn't suck."

The Saints - This Perfect Day (from Eternally Yours, 1978) - Long-haired Aussies who crashed the 70's British punk party with a ferocious Pop-inspired (Iggy Pop, that is) sound.

Big Sleep - Saints & Scholars (from a 1985 flexi) - DIY indie rock out of scenic paradise that was 80's Belfast. (Correction: The band actually hailed from Newtownards, ten miles east of Belfast.) It's a bit like a John McGahern story boiled down into a two-minute pop song: "This land of saints and scholars/is a land of fools and clowns."

you’ll dream of microwaves tonight

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself contemplating the parallels between Bridezillas and the “two minutes hate” of Orwell’s 1984, when I happened to jog loose a random memory about a story I read in grade school. It was about a future society where the populace was kept in line though a ubiquitous food additive that made those who ingested it susceptible to subliminals embedded in the (government-controlled) television broadcasts. A teenage chemistry whiz manages to unravel the secrets of the totalitarian state’s social control program, but like Winston Smith, ends up learning the hard way that you can’t fight city hall Big Brother.

The story disturbed me immensely when I first read it a sci-fi anthology that had been collecting dust in the back of my fifth grade classroom, and even over the space of twenty-plus years, I felt a small chill when I recalled it. The titles of the story and the anthology eluded me, and the book itself was most certainly consumed in the fire that destroyed that wing of my elementary school in the mid-eighties. (Along with the school library’s copy of an absolutely stunning retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey illustrated with Greek urn-inspired watercolor paintings that now goes for a small fortune online. If only I had been bold enough to commit petty larceny in my formative years…)

I did, however, remember the name of the breakfast cereal in the story that piques the doomed student’s curiosity: “Biskies.” Armed with that small lead, I popped onto the internet to see what Google could uncover for me. Based on the results returned, it seemed that I was not the only child traumatized by the story, which turned out to be “A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” by Raymond F. Jones. It appeared in The Other Side of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Stories About Young People in the Future published by Random House in 1973. A quick check of half.com, my usual go-to site for cheap out-of-print books, turned up a reasonable-priced copy which was promptly ordered by yours truly and delivered a week or so later by the USPS.

The style of the book mirrors that of those Alfred Hitchcock horror and suspense anthologies (Monster Museum, Haunted Houseful, et cetera) that used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was a wee lad, and the book itself seems like an attempt to spin off the format into the science fiction realm. (Plugs for several of the Hitchcock anthologies appear on the inside of the dustjacket’s back endleaf, which supports my theory.) I managed to finish the entire book in a single evening’s reading, and it was fascinating to discover how much of the material I remembered, misremembered, or just plum forgot over time.

Many of the online commentaries about The Other Side of Tomorrow make note of the generally bleak tenor of the stories considering the target audience, but I’d have to respond by saying it was published at a time when bleakness in was in vogue. For all its prognosticative window-dressing, science fiction is most usually rooted in the issues and concerns of the “now,” which is why the art-deco alien cities of 1930’s sci-fi and the chrome and neon Nippon-ocentric worlds of 1980’s cyberpunk novels appear kitschy and quaint these days.

1973, the year The Other Side of Tomorrow was published, was smack dab in the middle of a period I’ve informally dubbed The Great Disillusionment, a mass crisis of faith in the wake of the failures of both the Establishment and the counterculture to effectively respond to changing times. The war in Vietnam, race riots, Kent State, the growing concern over the state of the environment, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the stagnation of real wages, the assertion of and resistance to the demands by historically marginalized groups for equal rights, the violent implosion of the counterculture movement – these events formed the tapestry that serves as the contextual background for The Other Side of Tomorrow, and in light of that fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t an even bleaker read.

Not all of the stories are grim in tone. Thomas N. Scortia’s “Final Exam” is a straightforward adventure story with overtones similar to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series or even the 60’s Green Lantern comic book tales. “Night of the Millennium” by Edward D. Hoch is an adventure-mystery yarn set in the last few hours of the year 1999, where the writer envisions a future where fifteen year olds are considered independent adults (as opposed to a world where twenty- and thirty-somethings attempt to prolong their adolescence indefinitely).

Arthur Tofte’s “The Speeders” is a reiteration of Lord of the Flies by way of Harlan Ellison’s “Along the Scenic Route,” as teenage repeat offender speed freaks (of the vehicular, not the meth-head, sort) are shuttled off to a prison camp where they can fatally indulge their lead feet. It’s not a happy story, by any stretch, but the main characters don’t really elicit the reader’s sympathy, leaving one to feel that they’re just paddling toward a foregone conclusion.

Both Joseph Green’s “Let My People Go!” and J. Hunter Holly’s “The Others” deal with the plight of throwbacks and mutations in worlds where genetic enhancement is the norm. Holly’s story is the better of the two, and features real moments of pathos (whereas the first person narrator in Green’s story is too clinically detached to be taken seriously as a believable character), but both tales end with a sense of hope for the outcasts’ future.

I found Leigh Brackett’s “Come Sing the Moons of Moraven” and Gail Kimberly’s “Peace, Love, and Food for the Hungry” of particular interest because they both address the issues of the sixties’ youth movement in a direct and unromantic manner through the premise of young folks attempting, and failing, to create off-world utopias. The young colonists in Brackett’s story are highly-educated, highly-motivated pioneers whose earnest dreams come up against and immutable force of nature. The communal society of Kimberly’s story finds itself being crushed alive by their own demons, embodied by a rapidly multiplying mass of alien lifeforms that feed on the colonists’ negative emotions, which are in ample supply despite their frequently-mouthed “love the brother” homilies. The vectors of delivery may be science-fiction tales, but the echoes of Great Disillusionment loom large over both stories, specifically the death of the dream via unyielding external pressures (Chicago 1968) or the internal seeds of self-destruction (the Manson Family murders and the rise of militant factions, plus the seamy side of the free love and drug cultures). It’s depressing stuff, but absolutely of its time.

The two dystopian future tales, the previously mentioned “A Box of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” and Gordon Eklund’s “Examination Day” are both unremittingly bleak, but that’s par for the course in dystopian fiction, whose appeal lies in painting a really grim (and ostensibly cautionary) picture of the possible shapes of things to come, especially when it extrapolates based on present trends, hothousing problematic acorns into terrifyingly twisted giant oak trees. “Biskies” is by far the better story in terms of premise and execution, but the core concept of “Examination Day” – in a society where careers are determined by the state, how does one deal with being selected to oversee a concentration camp? – is strong enough to carry the tale despite several awkward missteps by the author. I once read an essay (and I wish I could remember where) that the overarching theme in fiction about adolescence is that of acknowledging limits, bartering the dreams of youth for the realities of adulthood at a really lopsided rate of exchange – and nowhere has the rate of exchange been as lopsided as in “Examination Day.”

If there’s a current of grimness in there stories, it’s one in sync with the tone of that era of young adult fiction from Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War to Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah to Paul Zindel’s The Pigman to the works of S.E. Hinton and even M.E. Kerr (Not to mention Jack Thomas’s teen trash classic Heavy Number, which is as close an American equivalent to Richard Allen’s Skinhead novels as one can find.) Given the reactionary trends of the past three decades, it may seem harsh stuff to market to kids, but, speaking from personal experience, the kids are a lot tougher than the grown-ups give them credit for being, and there are worse things than being given an opportunity to think about big issues, rather than spoon feeding them aseptic escapist fare in hopes of delaying the inevitable.

The Epoxies – No Interest (from Stop the Future, 2005) – Maura brought home the new Epoxies EP the other day. I’m not sure what I think about it, yet. There’s a decent enough Wipers’ cover, a formerly iTunes-exclusive bonus track from Stop The Future, and two new songs that are slower and more experimental than anything previously released by the band.

Max Frost and The Troopers – Shape of Things to Come (from Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, 1998) – A repost from last year’s cult movie-themed post, but too perfect a fit to pass on.

The B-52’s – Song for a Future Generation (from Whammy! 1983) – Hello, I’m Andrew, I’m a Pisces! I like nectarines and writing long, self-conscious blog posts!

it makes no difference anyway

Today I am going to discuss books, in particular two books that possess a unique resonance for me.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

That’s the final line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. It’s my favorite work of fiction, perhaps because it strikes so close to home. As does the film Withnail and I, but while that makes watching the movie much, much harder, there’s something about Fitzgerald’s prose that makes it worth the pain of revisiting those old, uncomfortable memories.

I was once Nick Carraway to a punk rock Jay Gatsby, an inveterate optimist whose future dreams were hopelessly tangled up in a romanticized past. Unlike the literary Gatsby, who “turned out all right in the end” (apart from the fatal gunshot wound), the foul dust which preyed upon him did not float in his wake but was carried – proudly and willingly – in his person.

And I watched. And for a while at least, I believed. Or I wanted to.

Because the truth is that Jay Gatsby was a bit of a fool. Granted, the stuff of his foolishness was more honest and pure than the miasma of corruption and selfishness that surrounded and would eventually destroy him, but it was foolish nonetheless. He fixes himself on recapturing a lost moment, and turns all his energies toward making it happen, shrugging off what a saner soul might consider intractable obstacles as being merely “personal.” It’s the American Dream (which like all dreams, is an illusion at heart) of being able to achieve anything, as long as one wants it badly enough. Literary Gatsby wanted Daisy; my Gatsby wanted fame and fortune, Hollywood-style (and women, too, but those would come with package), but his methods weren’t much different from his counterpart’s – elaborate constructs created in service of an intrinsically doomed plan assembled to a repeated chorus of “if only…”

Except Gatsby had the good sense to lay (or float face-) down after Wilson took his misdirected vengeance upon the man. The literary Gatsby exited the stage with his precious dream intact; the real-life Gatsby to which I refer refused to quit, no matter how many holes reality blasted through him, and continued to stagger aimlessly in pursuit of his desire like a shambling revenant from a low budget horror film. It grew too much to take for even the most impartial of unreliable witnesses, and after a half-dozen unnecessary sequels, I quit paying attention. A sadder but wiser Nick Carraway returned home to the Midwest; I fucked off to suburbs northwest of Boston.

Literature and are in general are deceptive by nature, a vicarious spectacle created through the sleight of hand called “craft.” We feel like participants, but the actual process is that of bearing witness, no matter how much we project ourselves into the work. Reality is never as simple as a fictional construct, no matter how elaborate or true to life a work may feel to us.

I can watch The Wild Bunch and get choked up every time at the part where the gang makes the unspoken decision to take back their comrade from the brutal General Mapache, a course of action made all the more noble by its inevitably doomed nature. In the end Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch Brothers reap nothing for the act of redemption but brutal demises under the hot desert sun. They went out proudly, but it makes little difference to the vultures and other carrion-eaters who feast on their corpses. It’s a great place to visit, but not one I particularly care to live in. Reality is messier (or to put it in more blatantly obvious terms, more “real”) and that applies not only to violent western films, but across the entire spectrum of creative expression, from teen comedy films, romance novels, or even Food TV programs. Gatsby turned out all right in the end because there was an end – a terminal string of perfectly constructed sentences that closed up the narrative, leaving the rest in the imagination of the reader or the critical dissecting pan of the graduate student; in reality the narrative keeps limping along, even when the story really ought to have ended. Such was my experience as spectator in the world of dreams unfulfilled (or unfulfillable).

I’ve always been more content to be an observer than a participant. It’s not so much a sluggishness of the blood or failure of nerve as a natural inclination to bear witness. My father once defined heroism in terms of the grainy newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster; “You see all those people running away from the flames,” he said, “but there are a handful of folks running toward the wreckage. That’s what heroism is.” I’d like to think that I’d have the presence of mind to be part of the latter category. I have stepped up, with various degrees of trepidation, to the plate on many occasions, but there have been more times where I’ve simply observed and made metal notes while all hell broke loose.

The one incident I remember most clearly involved a fight in a club I belonged to during college. Two members came to blows over a woman who had long since left the group. They tussled, books and boardgames tumbled from shelves, and I sat impassively on a table and watched it unfold. It was my wife, along with another female club member, who boldly waded into the fray and separated the combatants, and she earned a not-quite-broken foot for her efforts. During the post game wrap-up, she asked me why I chose not to intervene. I didn’t, and still don’t, have a better answer to her question than “because it was fascinating to watch.” The notion of doing, or not doing, something never even crossed my mind.

As I said, it’s not a failure of nerve, though if I were to analyze my pattern of behavior, I’d say it stemmed from a sense of comfortable withdrawal, which brings us to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. While The Loved One, Waugh’s morbid satire of the American Way of Death, is and shall remain my favorite of his works, Decline and Fall speaks to me on a personal level unmatched by any other novel. Through no fault of his own, college student Paul Pennyfeather finds himself enmeshed in a series of darkly comedic misadventures that end up landing him right where he started from, only more world-weary and with a better sense of what he really is.

In a conversation with his one time finance toward the end of the novel, he likens the world to one of those giant spinning wheels at a funhouse. Many people are content to keep crawling toward the center, no matter how many times the wheel throws them off, but Paul is content to keep to the room’s edge and not make the effort. It’s an admission of self that closely mirrors my own acknowledgement of my limitations, and I cite Paul’s analogy whenever the subject turns to why I hide my light (the brightness of which is usually exaggerated) under a bushel. (A minor clarification: I’m not hiding it under a bushel. It’s hidden in a steel safe entombed beneath a rockrete bunker covered with camouflage netting, okay?)

My “adventures,” if they could even be classified as such, were far more prosaic than Paul’s experiences with South American brothels and dank London prison cells, but the net results in terms of our psyches were the same – a personal (as opposed to political) conservatism and appreciation of stability within one’s immediate sphere. I admit that doesn’t sound “punk rock” at all, but the notions of non-stop excitement and a life amorphous are luxuries of youth. Far better, I think, to admit the romantic fallacy and work from there than to pay lip service to a false dream. Plus, whether you credit a depressing sense of personal stasis or a reasoned self-awareness, I have managed to stay true to my ideals while other acquaintances have become that which they most despised or gotten lost entirely.

T.S. Eliot, speaking through the mouth of J. Alfred Prufrock, asked "Do I dare to eat a peach?" The real question is “Do I want to eat one?” I’ve enjoyed them in the past, but I think I’ve had my fill. They also tend to make one’s hands all sticky, too.

I suspect the mission statement for Armagideon Time lies hidden between the lines of my above ramblings...

Gary Numan – Observer (from The Pleasure Principle, 1979) - Cold, clinical, and detatched. It's perfect.

Groucho Marx – I’m Against It (from Flashbacks Vol. 2: Novelty Songs 1914-1946, 2000) - The contrarian anthem, you say? I beg to differ.

come on, tell me what I’m after

Between birthday gifts and the vagaries of my biweekly pay schedule, my bank account has been atypically flush these past few weeks, and I used this rare opportunity to purchase a bunch of books that had been languishing in Amazon wish list limbo. Here’s a rundown of some of my recent acquisitions:

The Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow – I have an embarrassing confession to make: Your humble narrator, for all his ineffectual attempts at establishing a level of coolness, is a lapsed Warhammer/W40k nerd. I don’t play the games much these days, because of the commitment of time and money involved (to say nothing about how hard it is to find sane opponents who respect the spirit of the rules, as opposed to fanatical “loophole lawyers”), but I do try and keep up with the various revisions and the occasional novelization.

This book is the fourth installment of the Horus Heresy series, covering the events of the civil war that rocked the Imperium of Man in the 31st Century. The short summary included in the original Realms of Chaos was my favorite part of that overly complicated (to the extent of being useless) rules supplement, and it has been entertaining to see the story fleshed out in greater detail. I just hope it doesn’t get dragged out too long for the sake of selling more novels, because there’s a fine line between disposable entertainment and tedium.

Showcase Presents The Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 1 – I think that my previous posts about the subject have made my jadedness – either apathetic or nostalgic – about comics books fairly clear. It’s hard for me to work up even a sliver of enthusiasm about new and pending releases, even when all signs point to a given work being a cut above the rest of the slop. This reasonably priced (and quite massive) reprint collection of the Legion’s early adventures, however, set my nerd-senses all a’tingling. Even if I didn’t have my current surplus of cash, I still would have picked it up on its release last Wednesday instead of delegating it to a slot on my ever growing wish list.

There’s something irresistible about a group of somewhat callous, somewhat stupid teenage superheroes flitting around an extremely dated-looking 30th Century. Plus, I’ve been a Legion fan for almost thirty years now, though I dropped the book at the start of its present incarnation. (It was one reboot too many for me.) I was never going to spend the cash on the hardcover color reprints or on the individual back issues I needed, so this black and white “phonebook” collection was perfectly suited for my needs.

YOTSUBA&! Vol. 1 by Azuma Kiyohiko – I read very little manga, partially because there’s isn’t a whole lot that interests me and partially because I’m not fond of the “authentic” read from right-to-left conceit. I know there are aesthetic concerns involved in flipping the artwork into the Western format, but the puritanical insistence on maintaining the original “backwards” layout feels more like an fannish affectation of “exotic” Orientalism than an artistic decision….kind of like that one whitebread student in Japanese class who insists on referring to everyone as “–san” or “-sensei.” (My wife’s Japanese instructor shut down one such individual out of the gate with a raised palm and a brusque “No. Stop it.”)

I’ve heard a lot of good things about YOTSUBA&!, though. The title character, an adorable (yet astonishingly clueless) adopted green haired sprite reminds me a lot of my adorable (yet astonishingly clueless) adopted beagle-boxer-chow Adeline, and the quickest way to my heart is through similarities with my pets.

Science Fiction in the Real World by Norman Spinrad – This is the first work of literary criticism (unless you count that Comics Journal collection of interviews with 1970’s comic book writers) I’ve purchased in, well, I can’t really remember. The late 90’s, maybe? Some of the essays in this collection are very dated, but there’s still a great deal of interest here for anyone interested in science fiction or genre issues in general. Many of Spinrad’s insights into what makes science fiction succeed or fail could be easily applied to the realm of comics. (There is an essay on graphic novels in the book, but there’s nothing in it that hasn’t been said more effectively elsewhere countless times already.) His examination of the pitfalls involved in pursuing a sincere literary vision while facing the pressures endemic to working in a commercial genre is by itself worth the price of purchase.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne – Considering what an influence Sterne’s extended exercise in creative digression has been on my style of writing, it’s shocking that I waited so damn long to replace the copy of the novel that I lent out to someone in college and never got back. It worked out for the best in the end, as I was able to get a hold of a good as new, fully annotated copy of the definitive “Florida” edition from a seller for the princely sum of 97 cents, plus shipping.

How much has this novel tinted my work at Armagideon Time? Here’s a sample passage to illustrate it for you:

…the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwtixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is at fault, will terminate in friendship. –O diem praeclarum!—then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in nature, or tedious in its telling.

I’m sure if Sterne could have put mp3 links into the original text, he would have done it in a heartbeat. “This being a fair example of chamber music, much in vogue on the Continent; in a manner somewhat imprecise to me it captures the essence of Uncle Toby, or rather, his peculiar hobby-horse…”

The Minutemen – One Chapter in the Book (from What Makes a Man Start Fires? 1983) – It’s a short chapter, though. It only takes sixty seconds to get through…

Lazy Cowgirls – Read That Book (from Lazy Cowgirls, 1984) – Hooky, melodic garage punk that brushes very close to my Platonic ideal of what a song ought to sound like.

Echo & The Bunnymen – Read It in Books (from Crocodiles, 1980) – Haunting the chthonic borderlands between postpunk and psychedelia.