Halloween Countdown: October 26 - it really happened

A Resurrection Plant, eh?

That reminds me of something that happened to a friend of a friend of mine a while back. This guy worked the late shift at a warehouse in North Reading, and used to drive home along Route 62 during the wee hours. Well, this one time he was making his way down the dark and lonely state highway when he spotted something really weird along the side of the road. It was a potted plant -- some kind of fern, he said -- just sitting there on the shoulder of 62 westbound in the middle of the sticks with no sign how it ended up there.

It was late October, when the first killer frosts come to the northwestern suburbs. This guy figured that the plant would die if he didn't do something, pulled to the side of the road, and retrieved it. He wasn't the gardening type, but thought that maybe his mom or his girlfriend at the time could do something with it. Anyhow, he put it on the passenger seat of his '86 Monte Carlo and hopped back behind the wheel.

While the plant, being a plant, didn't move or say anything, the guy said he could sense a "really creepy vibe" from the potted fern. He said the interior of his car felt colder, even though he had the heater cranked to the max. (That's not uncommon for a GM car, though.) He also claimed to sense an "aura of sadness" coming from the plant and it got stronger as he got closer to the Wilmington town line.

The sensation abruptly stopped when he pulled up to the lights at the intersection next to one of the many giant luxury condo complexes recently plunked down in the northwestern suburbs. When he looked over at the passenger seat, the plant was no longer there.

He sped the rest of the way back to his apartment in Bedford. His roommate was still up when he got there and asked the guy why he seemed so jittery. The guy told about the mysterious fern, even though he knew how crazy the story sounded. The roommate didn't laugh, for he had worked part-time with landscaping firm near the area where the guy found the plant.

He told the guy about how a couple of years previous, a local nursery had gone up in flames when the greenhouse heater exploded. The force of the blast sent the contents of the nursery flying in all directions. The owner of the business decided not to rebuild, and instead sold off the property to an out-of-state residential development firm which cleared the land for a luxury condo development -- the very same development where the plant mysteriously disappeared from the guy's passenger seat.

So if you happen to be driving along Route 62 on some chill autumn night and see a solitary potted plant by the shoulder of the road, don't worry. It's just the Resurrection Plant making another sad, doomed effort to get back home....

(A little context, maestro!)

de tian - Beyond the Autumn - (from a 1980 EP) - This piece of DIY postpunk makes pefect music to haunt arthouses by.

Halloween Countdown: October 13 - shapeless in the dark again

Autumn is in full swing up here in New England. The days are getting shorter, the nights are feeling chillier, and the leaves on the trees are turning lovely shades of gold, red, and orange. Unless you count clean-up and prep work (which I don't), the home gardening season is effectively over.

The flowers in the beds which surround our house on the hillside have all gone to seed, save for a small clutch of pink impatiens determined to hang in there until the first frost and, of course, the various grouping of mums. I have nothing against mums, despite their status as harbinger for summer's demise. They're pretty enough flowers, though they lack the majesty of zinnias or sopranos, but they leave me pining for a more sophisticated late season blooming plant -- something, say, like the Evil Puritan Strangulation Vine...

An extremely hardy and aggressive hybrid of clematis and pansy, the Evil Puritan Strangulation Vine was introduced to the region in the 1600's by Prudence Carver. Goody Carver was executing by drowning in 1631 on charges of witchcraft, manifested by her unwillingness to sell her plot of land to Miles Standish for pennies on the pound.

Just prior to her execution, Carver enjoyed a last meal of wildflower seeds with a goat's blood chaser, and from her bloated, rotting corpse sprang the first documented specimen of Clematis puritanus asphyxiata.

The plant does have a (somewhat deserved) reputation for being difficult to cultivate, mostly due to the fact that it will only germinate in the rotted corpse of an evil spellcaster.

Despite what you might have been told, this does not have to be an insurmountable obstacle. There are many occult home and garden outlets willing to supply the needed remains for quite reasonable prices. (Some experts will tell you to seed the bed with a premium 3:5 witch/warlock mix, but I've had perfectly fine results using a cheap industrial-grade hedge wizard mulch.)

One of the best things about the plant is that it requires no special fertilizer or plant food once the first shoots poke through the soil. In fact, the plant can make do with whatever material is at hand. All it needs to thrive is plenty of water, well-drained soil, and the blood of your enemies.

If there is a drawback to planting an Evil Puritan Strangulation Vine, it's that the plant does tend to get a bit leggy and can quickly turn invasive if not carefully kept in check.

To prevent this from happening, I recommend sticking to a regular schedule of deadheading and pruning, which is best done by hand or teeth.

With a little bit of time and effort, you too can have a healthy, beautiful addition to your late-season garden that will make your neighbors green with envy and your enemies regret that they ever had the temerity to cross you.

The Cure - The Hanging Garden (Studio Demo) (from the expanded rerelease of 1982's Pornography LP) - Gone are the relentless beats and claustrophobic production of the album version, leaving behind a haunting remnant that sounds like it was plucked off of Seventeen Seconds.

we regret to inform you

A few minutes ago I brushed the back of my hand up against a stinging nettle plant by the patio, and my fingers are starting to swell up like balloons. I feel as if I dipped my left hand in molten lead.

As soon as I can fit my hands into my pair of work gloves again, that treacherous little excuse for a plant is going to die. Painfully and slowly.

The Alleycats - Give Me a Little Pain (from a 1978 single; collected on Dangerhouse Singles: Volume 2, 1992) - Oh, I've got plenty at the moment, but I like to share. This was on the flipside to the "Nothing Means Nothing Anymore" single, but I think it's a far superior track that should have been the rightful a-side. A very nice bit of early L.A. punk rawk.

or could it all just be me

Last night, Maura was feeding the outdoor cat colony when she noticed that one of the cats, Sioux, had an ugly, suppurating puncture wound on his back. I cleaned it out as best I could with peroxide and a topical antibiotic, but because it was so deep and nasty looking we called the vet’s office to have it looked at. The appointment was at 9:30 this morning, so we figured that we’d take Sioux in, have the cut cleaned out and sutured, then drop the poor guy off at our house before heading into work. If only it turned out to be that simple.

The wound turned out to be a fight injury, which means that we’ll have to crate Sioux up for a minimum of forty-five days. (If we hadn’t gotten him vaccinated for rabies already, we’d have to quarantine him for six months. Being proactive and conscientious pays.) As the pus pocket and scar tissue formation were on the severe side, Sioux also required minor surgery to drain and clean the wound. Maura didn’t anticipate that it would come to that, so didn’t think twice about feeding Sioux this morning, which meant that the surgery had to be delayed until the early afternoon (and we weren’t sure until a half hour ago if we’d even be able to bring him home tonight).

Taking into account the commuting times to and from our jobs and the possibility we’d have to drop everything to pick up Sioux, our plans to at least clock half a day’s work were scrapped and we decided to get some things done around the house instead. In my case, it meant mowing the lawn, a task I happen to love immensely. It’s especially enjoyable when the mower blades come unscrewed while the motor’s running full-bore. Getting to the underside to bolt them back on involves flipping the infernal machine over and flooding the carburetor, thus killing the machine until it dries out. I employed the wait time wisely, watching The Guru on USA -- or more precisely, watching five minute segments of the film (which wasn’t that terrible, to my surprise) intercut with ten minute blocks of commercials.

I did finally get to complete the job, though not without loudly announcing “This will end in either victory or the utter destruction of both the machine and myself….Hopefully not myself,” within earshot of my neighbor who I didn’t realize was out in his own yard. (Eh, if my wife’s singing to the feral cats hadn’t already clued the neighborhood in to what kind of people we are, I’d be more embarrassed…) Because it was still early, and I had nothing else on my plate apart from waiting for the vet’s office to call, I even broke out the weedwhacker and pruning shears and added some finishing touches to the yard. It’s very impressive looking at the moment, although my pride in a job done well is tempered by the knowledge that we’ll back to Crabgrass City by the weekend.

Afterwards, I crashed out for a while and watched Trevor Nunn’s 1996 version of Twelfth Night, featuring Grant Morrison Barry Andrews Patrick Stewart Ben Kingsley turn in a decent performance as the fool, Feste. I’m not so keen on the whole anachronistic setting/costuming trend when it comes to things Shakespearean, but my love for the play (my favorite of all the Bard’s work) kept me from getting too distracted by the faux Victoriana vibe. The idea that anyone could mistake Imogen Stubbs in drag for Steven Macintosh did stretch my suspension of disbelief to the limits, though.

I came away from Twelfth Night with hankering for more dramatic art of the highest caliber, which I was able to find in the form of Mark L. Lester’s 1979 classic attempt to address the problems of post-industrial capitalism, love across class lines, and which leotard looks best with red-sequined roller skates. Shakespeare may not have written Roller Boogie, but he damn sure wishes he had:

Alas, poor Bobby James! I knew him, Jammer: a fellow
of perfectly feathered hair, of most excellent satin hot pants: he hath
done the eight-wheeled cha cha with me a thousand times; and now,
what a major bummer it is! my buzz harshes at it.

(Not many people are aware of this, but Xanadu was based on an early Folio draft of Coriolanus. The Japanese-only laserdisc featuring the original ending where Gene Kelly eviscerates Michael Beck during an elaborate tap dance sequence goes for big bucks on eBay.)

In the time since I began putting together this post, poor Sioux has come home from the vet’s. He’s a bit groggy and depressed, but doing well otherwise:

So there you have it, my day so far – an epic tale of mundanity, otherwise known simply as life.

Here are two relevant tracks by two bands whose fairly impressive bodies of work were overshadowed by the public awareness singularities called the “signature hit.”

---

Simple Minds – Life in a Day (from Life in a Day, 1979)

Modern English – Life in the Gladhouse (from After the Snow, 1982)

Can you dig it, baby?

I really hate mowing the lawn, but what could I do? The crabgrass out back was as high as my shin (and I’m 6’3”) and it was wiser to tackle the project on a relatively mild day than to get stuck having to do it under less auspicious temperatures and levels of relative humidity. It’s still a major hassle to get done even in the best of circumstances, though.

Suburban Lawns – Anything (from Suburban Lawns, 1981) – Our house is located on the slope of a largish hill, and our backyard topography includes multiple steep inclines that make controlling the lawnmower a backbreaking endeavor. If I’m not trying to keep the damn thing from rolling backwards over my toes, I’m straining against gravity’s mischievous efforts to send the mower rolling off down the hillside without me.

Trouser Press was lukewarm about the material on the Suburban Lawns LP, calling it “highly ordinary” and “tiresome.” I think the album is as fresh sounding today as it was twenty-five years ago, and an excellent example of “new wave” as open-ended push against musical boundaries (as opposed to “new wave” as “punk/postpunk with commercial aspirations”).

Dead Kennedys – A Child and His Lawnmower (from Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, 1987) – Jello Biafra has a point about the trigger-happy nature of American society here, but I, too, have thought about inflicting violence upon my lawn mower on several occasions. It’s not that machine is a useless piece of shit. Quite the contrary, it’s a pricey Toro model my father-in-law gave us as a housewarming present. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it’s not really suited for me personally as user.

My father-in-law has retained his prodigious upper body strength into his mid-seventies, and I’m sure the machine felt light as a feather when he tried it out at the store. I, on the other hand, am built like a stick figure with an eating disorder, and I break into a sweat simply wheeling the thing out of the garage, much less playing suburban Sisyphus with it.

(I’m not too proud to admit I leave most of the household heavy lifting to Maura. I acknowledge my limitations, and accept that I rolled two 2’s and a 1 for my Strength score. I wasn’t planning on playing a Fighter anyhow.)

Friends of Distinction – Grazing in the Grass (from The Best of the Friends of Distinction, 1996) – It’s a gas, baby! Can you dig it? Just be sure to avoid tossing your picnic blanket down by Dog Shit Alley (the strip of land between the raspberry brambles and the swing set), because I’ve been a little lax with the raking lately. Oh, and watch out for the clusters of nettle plants we’ve been fighting a war of attrition with for the past three years. Also, Maura will kill you if you trample on (or run the mower over) the place where she’s been trying to grow lavender since 2005.

and the dream of what love could be

Today was Gardening Day, a holiday specific to our little house up on the hillside.

Every spring, right around tax refund time, Maura starts flipping though gardening magazines and catalogs, plotting out what each of the backyard flowerbeds will hold, and reciting lists of things she’d “really love to plant this year” to no one in particular. Once we’ve sorted how much of the tax refund check can be reasonably used as mad money, we take a day off of work, and I have the privilege of escorting her to a local nursery where she picks out what will be the “showplace” flowers of this year’s garden.

Gardening is more of my wife’s hobby than mine. I can thing of many other things I’d rather be doing than rooting around in the dirt (and uncovering the veritable cornucopia of bizarre things the previous owners of the house buried in random locations: whole bananas, oil filters, silverware, coffee tins full of washers), but the end results are always spectacular to behold. I even make suggestions about what plants to buy on occasion, mostly based on childhood memories of what used to grow in my mom’s garden.

We bought a lot of herbs this time out, based on the success we had with growing lemon basil and dill in containers last year. I picked out some peppermint, because it smells nice and makes a good perennial ground cover, and some catnip, since the feral cats who shelter in our garage go mad for the stuff. Marmalade, a twenty pound orange behemoth, particularly loves to get a heavy buzz on then climb into a patio chair to bask in the sun for most of the day. I made the mistake of offering a couple of leaves to Jem, because I wondered how it would affect his usual zany demeanor, and it turned him into the feline equivalent of a strung out meth addict with a rusty shiv. He was so desperate for another fix that he followed me around crying and grabbing at my hands for most of the afternoon. My fingers haven’t hurt this badly since my aborted stint as a professional cactus juggler. I swear I caught the little bastard eyeing the home theater system and thinking of a way he could pawn it to feed his habit.

In other “giving stuff I probably shouldn’t to the animals” news, I let Oscar the Chihuahua-Pug have a Swedish Fish jelly candy from the big bag of them I bought while we were out today. I thought his relentless determination to finish the damn thing despite having to spit it out every couple of seconds was funny as hell, but Maura did not concur. It was even funnier watching him play keep-away with the wife as she tried to prevent him from swallowing it, which he finally did. Hey, he begged me to give him one, and it’s not like I gave him chocolate or onions.

There’s no theme, per se, for today’s musical selections. As part of our Gardening Day celebration, the wife and I went on one of our “pizza and comics” dates in between stops on our itinerary. It’s exactly what it sounds like, we go out for pizza (or pasta) at the local Papa Gino’s and read comics as we eat. (Well, the wife tried to make sense of Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman run and I reread the second part of Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy of novels.) During the course of our meal, Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” came up on restaurant’s piped-in music feed (along with Heart’s “Never,” but I’d rather forget that entirely), and it reminded me of this cover version of the song:

The Merton Parkas - Band of Gold (from The Complete Mod Collection, 1997) – Parkas’ member Mick Talbot would later go on to join former Jam frontman Paul Weller in the Style Council, a band that proved that the whole can be less than the sum of its parts.

...and that, in turn, got me thinking about the whole “Mod Revival” scene, which like the black plague or herpes, seems prone to periodic eruptions. Ok, that’s a bit harsh, I concede. The late 70’s mod revival musical scene did produce a number of gems…and a far greater number of The-Who-by-way-of-The-Jam wannabees, dire attempts toward a Cockney Motown sound, and mediocre power pop tracks. Still there’s a certain allure to hip (and retro) fashion, Vespa scooters, and cheap amphetamines that will always prove irresistible to a certain segment of the youth population. What was it, like three or four years ago when it seemed like every hip indie comic referenced the mod subculture and/or scooters?

Thank goodness that trend is over with, although I did enjoy Dave Gibbons’s The Originals (it helped that he was a veteran of the original 60’s mod scene) and Chynna Clugston’s Scooter Girl well enough.

Since I’ve already dug out the mod revival portion of my music archives, here are a couple other tracks I rather enjoy:

The Purple Hearts – Scooby Doo (from This Is Mod, Vol. 2, 1996) – The Scooby Gang is supposedly based on the cast of characters from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which would make Daphne the animated incarnation of Tuesday (“Thalia Menninger”) Weld. Sigh.

The Name – Fuck Art, Let’s Dance (from 100% British Mod, 1998) – Art Hindle? Art Linkletter? Art Garfunkle? Art Carney? Art Clokey?

everybody is an icicle

Damn, it’s cold outside. Not as cold as last night, when I intended to write this post but instead passed out watching Battlestar Galactica, but still cold enough. Just three days ago, the temperature in Boston brushed close to the 60 degree mark. Very strange, but it 2006 has been a strange year weather-wise from the start. Cold and wet, then hot and wet, with an on-again off-again Indian summer that extended into the first week of December, it’s just not right. Whether one chalks it up to global warming or a statistical anomaly, having three “hundred year” storms in a decade is a tad disconcerting.

The funky weather played havoc with my wife’s ambitious gardening plans for 2006. At least half of what she planted rotted in the ground, due to the heavy rains. The vegetable garden, especially the tomato plants suffered something fierce, and what was shaping up to be a huge raspberry yield slipped away and went to seed. Next year will be different, though. I’m going to invest in a ice cream maker and a box of Mason jars, and put the berries to good use, even if it involves going out and picking in the middle of a hurricane.

A Blaze Colour – Cold As Ever (from A Blaze Colour EP, 1982) – Obscure minimalist synthpop from Belgium. If you’re the kind of person who would enjoy this track, that’s all you need to know.

King Missile – Frightened and Freezing (from Mystical Shit, 1990) – Most folks associate King Missile with John S. Hall’s surreal deadpan monologues on tracks like “Detachable Penis” or “Jesus Was Way Cool,” but the band did record a number of bona fide songs, like this no wave-y bipolar spaz attack. It's not as good as "Margaret's Eyes," a sweet love song about S&M, or "Mr. Johnson," a piss take on 60's love-in nonsense, but it does fit with today's theme.

Magazine – Permafrost (from Secondhand Daylight, 1979) – Punk, synth, and post-punk collide in this creepy, downbeat track. Sample lyric: I will drug you and fuck you/on the permafrost. I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up on the soundtrack to CSI: Juneau (coming this fall to a CBS affiliate near you).