Halloween Countdown: October 27 - derivatives of the damned

The events leading up to the recent economic meltdown, as depicted in The Witching Hour #51 (February 1975):

It sounds like a sweet deal...until you realize that you've leveraged your immortal soul for far more than it is actually worth. When the spiritual commodities market crashes, it crashes hard, and no amount of intervention, government or divine, can stem the karmic tide.

(Satan, being the wily devil he is, was able to finagle a seven figure bonus for himself from the executive board just prior to the collapse -- and government takeover -- of the Beelzebub Brothers brokerage house.)

The Misfits - Horror Business (from the Horror Business EP; collected on The Misfits, 1986) - No Halloween Countdown would be complete without something from the Garden State's unparalled masters of horrorpunk, so here is the band's loving tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Sid Vicious, and Nancy Spungen.

Patterson's People - Shake Hands with the Devil (from a 1966 single) - Here's a dandy little slice of 60's freakbeat that proudly wears its infernal raunchiness on its sleeve.

Halloween Countdown: October 21 - Kirk versus the spiders

Hey, Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen, you might want to be careful. Reliable sources tell me that the place is full of spiders.

You can't say I didn't warn you, pal.

1977's Kingdom of the Spiders is just one of the many "animal attack" films that graced screens both big and small during my childhood, but the towering presence of William Tiberius Shatner sets this otherwise by-the-numbers affair head, shoulders, and polyester slacks above the rest of the genre pack. I daresay it's the best project involving small, hairy nightmares that The Shat has ever starred in...unless you count his time spent on T.J. Hooker opposite Adrian Zmed.

Plus, the film's ending is still pretty creepy in a really obvious and cheap-looking kind of way. (If you're going to pass off acrylic landscape paintings as aerial shots, it helps if the painter understands the concept of two-point perspective.)

my kitten is a dream

After the tragic death of poor Tessie the Tortoise last June, my wife and the kindhearted folks of the Woburn Feral Cat Coalition tracked down and captured the combined litter of Tessa's and her sidekick Pepi's kittens so that they could be socialized and placed in good homes. One of wee kits managed to dodge the feral kitten round-up and started tagging along with Pepi to our house during feeding times. We named the orange and white ball of fuzz "P.J." as in "pajamas," "Pepi Junior," or perhaps as a subconscious homage to the Intrepid Mariner (and Friend to Felines) of the South Coast.

Over the past few weeks, Maura and the folks from the WFCC have been staking out the feral cat feeding sation in our driveway in hopes of trapping the dynamic mother-and-child duo so that Pepi could be spayed and released and little "Peej" could be socialized for adoption before his feral ways could become too ingrained (though I've yet to encounter a feral in our colony that didn't become human-friendly after spending some time around the wife and I. Maura tells me I'm a "cat whisperer," whatever that means).

Pepi, however, has turned out to be as elusive as Robert Denby, and can smell a set-up a mile away even though the irresistable aroma of canned sardines. While Peej has inherited his mom's cunning ways, the WFCC was finally able to trap the little fellow last night while Maura was at a roller derby bout and I was at Target trying to recapture my lost youth via action figures. (What, the Kid Flash shirt didn't already clue you in that I'm a major fucking geek?)

Pepi, alas, still remains at large, and quite possibly pregnant again, but Peej is now chilling out in a little pen we set up for him to feel secure as we try and get him acclimated to humans and indoor life. I've been letting him curl up on my lap while I read so that he can take in his new, strange surroundings from a safe vantage point, and it's been working out pretty well so far (apart from the savaging my right hand took when I tried to clean off some of the dingleberries he brought with him). Our house's resident feline population isn't sure what to make of the new arrival yet, but we're hoping they adjust fairly soon so that we can let Peej roam free and discover the many comforts of housecatdom.

The First Gear - Leave My Kitten Alone (from the Pebbles, Vol. 6: The Roots of Mod LP, 1980) - Here's some fine tooth-and-claw freakbeat from the British Invasion period, possibly featuring (the sources aren't entirely in agreement) the guitar stylings of a young Jimmy Page.

Schrödinger's landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the valet of the infantile

It's been an unusally hectic Sunday and yet another massive thunderstorm is bearing down upon the northwest suburbs of Boston, so I'm going to have to leave you to puzzle out this following sequence from "Poison Ivy," a gag strip from the rich vein of material that is Feature Comics #98, on your own...


The Units - Tight Fit (from Digital Stimulation, 1979) - Together in electric nightmares.

Sounds Incorporated - Sounds Like Movin' (from Rinky Dink, 1965) - I have made it clear in my will that this track will be used as my funeral march. Don't mourn, comrades, shake yer tailfeathers!

don't know what you're missing

Imagine Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey as directed by Sam Peckinpah and co-scripted by William Gibson and the Animal Liberation Front and you'd have a decent, if incomplete, idea of the premise behind Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's 2004 mini-series We3. I say "incomplete" because underneath the high concept sci-fi ultraviolence, We3's tale of three cybernetically-augmented animals on the run from a black-ops weapons lab possesses a level of genuine pathos rarely encountered in a work of fiction, and especially within the medium of comics.

While I'm well acquainted with the technical concept of catharsis (as is anyone who has ever taken a college literature or drama class), it isn't often that I come across a work that inspires the actual emotional purgative-tranformative process. This is partly because I'm a jaded old fart, but also because I'm hyper-sensitive to attempts to stack the creative deck in order to force such emotional responses. Art is manipulative by nature, but too many artists get too eager and overplay their hands to dismal effect. Reading We3 is a cathartic experience for me, an emotional roller coaster ride that leaves me feeling undefinably but noticeably changed (and a bit teary-eyed) afterward. (Granted, stories with animal protagonists have a paw up in the "pull the heartstrings" stakes, but Morrison's characterizations and Quitely's illustrations of "1" the dog, "2" the cat, and "3" the rabbit ring so authentic it hurts me to read the more tragic parts of the story.)

Today marks the release of Grant Morrison's most current effort, Final Crisis #1, a big "event" title guaranteed to change the DC superhero universe forever (again, but for real this time, honest). I've read it, and it's decent enough for what it is, but there's already a vocal minority in the dark corners of the comics internet reiterating the usual charge lobbed at Morrison's work, namely that his stuff is "too hard to follow."

Morrison's stuff tends to be hit or miss with me, and I do think his infatuation with BIG CRAZY CONCEPTS tends to work at cross-purposes with his plot logic at times, but I never really considered his work to be incomprehensible (apart from the instances Morrison was deliberately attempting to be obtuse). Final Crisis, in comparison with some of Morrison's other work (The Invisibles or even parts of Seven Soldiers), is a model of narrative lucidity.

The real problem, I suspect, lies with the audience, who've been conditioned to see comics, especially superheroic stuff, as product to be consumed rather than material to be engaged. There's a thin line between a "challenging" work and self-indulgent wankery, but requiring more effort than a five-minute linear burn-through to grasp the material does not automatically place a work in the latter category. Junk food should not set the baseline for one's palate, and a genre shouldn't be held hostage by some lazy, retrograde bottom feeders.

Upon considering the fannish whinings, as well as Morrison's own remarks that fans who don't like the content ought to pencil in their own captions in the word balloons, I went up to the attic and dug out my old Creator-to-Creator translation machine. It's a heavily-modified version of Joel Robinson's Cartuner (here at the 4:00 mark) incorporating Babelfish source code which allows one to see how certain comics would have turned out if done by a different creator (like EC horror stories as done by Carl Barks, for example).

And so, in the name of SCIENCE, I took the following panel featuring 1 the dog and 2 the cat from the second issue of We3....


...and ran it through the machine to see how it theoretically could have been "improved" by other fan-favorite comic book writers.

The panel in question, as it would have been written by:

Brian Michael Bendis (Powers, Daredevil, Secret Invasion)*

Chuck Dixon (Nightwing, Robin, Snakes on a Plane: The Comic)

Mark Millar (Ultimates, Wanted, Civil War)

Roy Thomas (Avengers, Invaders, All-Star Squadron, and too many others to list)
...and just so the indie kids don't feel left out:

Brian Wood (Demo, DMZ, Northlanders)
I really wanted to try and generate a Chris Claremont one, but the machine's feed kept getting jammed on "focused totality," "starhair," and "violated my soul." The technology has its limits, apparently.

David Walker - Ring the Changes (from Le Beat Bespoke, 2004) - A harmonious marriage of powerhouse pop (a la Sir Tom Jones) and heavy, horny funk.

Quincy - Turn the Other Way Around (from Quincy, 1980) - Man, that Jack Klugman really rocks! (I kid. They were a New York-based power pop band that got some brief national exposure following the success of The Knack.)

Isabel Bond - Let's Find Out (from Beat at Cinecitta, Vol. 3, 1994) - This weird slice of freakbeat soul comes from the soundtrack of 1969 Italian sex comedy Vedo Nudo. My Italian is rusty, but I believe the title of the film translates into English as "broad pantomime and boob shots."

*In an actual Bendis comic, the text in that scene would have been frugally doled out across a nine-panel grid covering an entire page. The translation machine still needs some fine-tuning.

a fool might start a fight

My choice of footwear during my junior high school days:

Oh, how I loved my camouflage Chuck Taylors, Reagan Era militarism made manifest as funky footwear. I owned two pairs, both of which I wore until the canvas uppers rotted and came away from the rubber soles.

Though Chuck Taylors have since become a iconic fashion accessory for the hipster set, back in the mid-1980's they were simply another excuse for social ostracism for the lads and lasses attending the Kennedy Jr. High School. The sneaker wars were just beginning to heat up in those days, and the ever-changing hierarchy of brands acted as a quick-and-easy shorthand by which to separate the elect from the damned...and there was no quicker road to the Abyss than being caught wearing a pair camo high-tops.

Plus they had rubber toes, and rubber toes are for "fags" dont'cha know?

On the apex of the social pyramid, "My Adidas" ruled in the study hall as is in Heaven. I freely confess my lack of enthusiasm for rap and hip hop is rooted in class and race issues. I despised the rich white motherfuckers who were the biggest fans of those genres in my middle school days. It's hard to develop an appreciation for the "sounds of the street" when the son of the bank manager (sporting a designer tracksuit and gold chains) is the genre's resident musical ambassador.

Looking back, my decision to wear, and more importantly stick with, my woodland camo Chucks despite the taunts was an early step on my path to punk rock, in the sense that I started to grasp the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" rules of the game and simply walked away from the table. It's better to be an honest goat than a Sisyphean wannabe sheep.

Converse discontinued making the camouflage version of the shoe by the time my second pair finally gave up the ghost, and I had to settle for the basic black model until my freshman year, when I was given my first pair of combat boots by my father, and I haven't looked back since.

I don't regret the decision, though it did mean missing out on these stylin' fad-licensed kicks...

...ideal for Bat-dancing the night away (though they lack the proper arch support necessary for doing the Batusi without severe risk of injury).

Teen Idles - Sneakers (from the Minor Disturbance EP, 1980) - Not to be confused with the Idle Race, though I occasionally fantasize about Jeff Lynne and Ian MacKaye collaborating on a emo hardcore/symphonic prog concept album. Then I remember this and the resulting screams of terror can be heard as far away as the Pioneer Valley.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Camouflage (from BGM, 1981) - Oddball synth is the new KBD punk.

The Marks - High Heel Sneakers (from a 1966 single; collected on Rare & Raw Beat from the Sixties, Vol. 1, 1996) - Sure, this R&B standard has been covered by everyone and their collective grandmother, but you haven't lived until you've heard it translated into Dutch freakbeat.

I know just where I stand

It's a new year, children, and so let us start 2008 on a properly groovy note.

To facilitate the cosmic process, I, bitterandrew guru-andrew, have assembled a modest playlist of mod-tastic treasures for your aural enjoyment. Drink deep and let the music set you free.

Alan Moorehouse - Beatcoma (from Let's Boogaloo!, Vol. 3, 2007) - This happening bit of vintage library music is the current frontrunner in the "music I would use for my personal theme when I become dictator of the world" stakes. If you want a picture of that future, imagine a pair of go-go boots doing the frug on a human face — forever.

The Beat Chics - Now I Know (from The Beat Scene, 1998) - An all-female outfit that were contemporaries of (and toured with) a slightly better-known Liverpool quartet with a similar name.

Ennio Morricone - Valmont's GoGo Pad (from the Danger: Diabolik OST, 1968) - I *heart* Danger: Diabolik, and Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for the film is a major factor behind that sentiment.

Camera Obscura - Happy New Year (from Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, 2001) - This indie pop gem is the only contemporary track in today's featured selections, but it does have a decidedly retro tilt to it while being contextually appropriate, as well.

slave to the slide whistle

I've been grappling with a truly insidious earworm infestation today, brought on by my queueing up a stack of freakbeat compilations for background music while I did some housecleaning over the weekend. The work took longer than anticipated and the playlist cycled at least three times before I finished. As a result, this track...

The Moody Five - Blue Tail Fly (from a 1970 single; collected on Le Beat Bespoke, Vol. 2, 2007)

...haunted me though last night's dark dreams and into my waking hours today. Granted, one could do worse in the mimetic burn-in department than a fuzzed-out Germanic rawk rendition of an old American minstrel show song, but given a choice, I'd rather not spend the better part of my Monday unconsciously singing "jimmy crack corn" to myself while sitting in my cubicle.

My wife swears by the power of Herman's Hermits "I'm Into Something Good" for dislodging unwanted songs from one's noggin, but to me that's a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Instead I turned to a couple of recent musical acquisitions in search of possible relief.

First up was the The Hives' The Black and White Album, in which the Swedish garage rock revivalists employed the services of Pharrell Williams (and other big name producers) to tart up their raw sound into something more chart-friendly. I don't know whether those efforts will succeed or not (the album did crack the bottom end of the UK top thirty), but it did manage to effectively kill my interest in the band.

If trade-offs have to be made between artistic and commercial success, the former concern should be given more weight, for no other reason than overreaching to grasp for the latter rarely succeeds anyhow. If you are going to play against your existing strengths and the expectations of your existing fanbase, your material ought to be strong enough to achieve escape velocity. Otherwise you've simply devolved into a commercial vector for delivering flavor of the moment prefab pap, which is what a solid two-thirds of The Black and White Album sounded like to my ears. (See also post-Tragic Kingdom No Doubt and Gwen Stefani's solo career.)

Still plagued with my earworm, and depressed by hearing how low the mighty had fallen, I turned to The Kind of Goodnight, the new release by Atlanta garage rockers Tiger! Tiger! I picked up a copy on eMusic based on the strength of this track, sent to me as a part of a promo announcement:

Tiger! Tiger! - Black Daggers

The band works in the garage punk vein, but with more pronounced retro flourishes (organ riffs = pure bliss, as far as I'm concerned) and slightly off-kilter female vocals. I wasn't able to place my finger on it until my second listen-through, but it reminded me, in an oblique way, of Richard Hell and the Voidoids' Blank Generation, though Tiger! Tiger!'s sound is less abrasive and willfully idiosyncratic, which is perfectly fine given the punked up R&B tenor of the album's material.

It also turned out to be just the thing to flush "Blue Tail Fly" from my internal memory cache. It was a gratifying, if short-lived experience,however, because I shortly after made the mistake of including Deee-lite's "Groove is in the Heart" on my semi-random afternoon playlist, and I'm not sure even a frontal lobotomy could shake it loose from my skull.