Friday Night Fights: Fit to Be Tied

Hold onto your golden tiaras, ladies and gents, because this installment of the Donnybrook Cosmic features a widescreen dust up between the Amazons of Paradise Island and Eviless and her Saturnic Girls. (Great garage band name, that.)


It happened in the pages of Wonder Woman #28 (March-April 1948), in an epic tale best described as a Bayeux Tapestry of B&D sequences. While William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator, was never one to pass up the opportunity to depict his kink of choice in scripting the adventures of Princess Diana and company, he well and truly pulled out the stops in this long-form exploration of the many ways one could be bound, gagged, or otherwise physically restrained.

Here's the (much abridged) highlight reel:

Queen Hippolyte hog-tied!
Steve Trevor stripped to the waist and lashed to a post!
Wonder Woman used as a nautical ottoman!
The story also featured a number of Diana's most diabolic foes, organized by Eviless into the sinister Villainy Incorporated (VILI.N, presently trading at 37.54), and a shifty and dangerous lot they are...

...and to think Joss Whedon claimed Wonder Woman lacked a decent rogues' gallery. Pshaw, I say.

Our series of original/cover version pairings concludes with a glam rock masterpiece oozing with retro-futuristic decadence and its aggressively flat re-interpretation by a spin-off of Britpunk legends Blitz.

David Bowie - Suffragette City (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)

Rose of Victory - Suffragette City (from a 1983 single)

whisper sweet surprise

On the outside, this unassuming metal box may look like yet another means for Andrew to earn a row of stitches and a tetanus shot, but inside...

...is a veritable treasure trove of 7" wonders from the Me Decade, providing an interesting cross section of funk, rock, and disco flavors of the moment.

It's another one of Maura's estate sale discoveries, purchased a decade ago, then pushed to a corner of attic due to my lack of a functioning turntable. The organization and selection of the singles in the box makes me wonder if it wasn't part of an actual or aspiring DJ's collection, as it contains all the up-to-the-moment tracks one would expect to hear at any given booze-and-artificial-fabric-fueled wedding reception thrown during the wild years of the Ford Administration.

The only turd in the punch bowl regarding this astonishing acquisition was that the previous owner took rather poor care of the collection, and removed the individual singles from their sleeves and let them rattle loose between cardboard inserts. While some miraculously managed to remain pristine despite the abuse, most have skips, scratches and pops.

I usually take such eccentricites of wear and tear in stride, as they are part and parcel of what gives vinyl its unique charm. I was not thrilled, however, when I discovered that the two b-side tracks by the Buckeye funkateers (a.k.a. the Ohio Players) I had planned on posting today turned out to be sonically mutilated beyond recognition.

Oh, well. There's always Option B, which is sweet indeed...

Sweet - Burn on the Flame (the b-side to the 1974 "Fox on the Run" single) - Nothing like a little classic bubbleglam to kick the summer off on the right rockin' note. I think of it as the Platonic ideal behind the 1980's glam metal scene's host of imperfect shadows.

419 is a joke

URGENT MESSAGE:

Dearest readers,

I know this message may come to you as a surprise but please treat it for the urgency expected by it. We have been chosen as representatives for bitterandrew the High Seneschal of the Revolutionary United Front of Funkytown who was overthrown by the jealous masses on April 30th 2008 for being too handsome and witty for his own good.

After the High Seneschal went into exile, he instructed us to post this mini-playlist of happening sounds and groovy cuts inspired by the subject headers of bulk emails found in his spam folder on the morning of the revolution.

Best Regards
STEVE & EYDIE AMIN

(I'm actually kind of digging this exile business. The burdens of leadership are a hassle to shoulder for a low-key individual such as myself.)

When life gives you lemons, put them into a bowl on top of the fridge and forget about them until the rotting smell can't be ingnored any longer. When some bulk email scammer dumps a bunch of spam emails into your inbox, assemble a themed music post dealing with the subject matter.

"Miley Cyrus pictures available uncensored" - Wow, that didn't take long at all. Here's the thing: If you're going to try and use bait-and-switch tactics to attract my attention to the bogus "herbal supplement" you're hawking, you'll need to find a better enticement than Billy Ray Cyrus's tweener-targeted Vergeltungswaffe. Sure, I made my share of "Achy Breaky Heart" and mullet jokes back in the day, but why take your hyper-merchandised wrath out upon the nation's children, Billy Ray?

Hole - Celebrity Skin (from Celebrity Skin, 1998) - The only Hole I can stomach listening to, despite the songwriting presence of alt-rock antichrist Billy Corgan. The message of the song is that ambitions toward fame and celebrity can prove personally destructive. You know what else can be personally destructive? Scarfing down horse tranquilzers like they were M&M's, then following up the meal with a demerol chaser.

"Witchcraft will not help you in curing!" - So put your faith in Canadian pharmacy scams instead!

Spike Jones - That Old Black Magic (from The Anthology, 1994) - I can't help but think that Coldplay's "Violet Hill" would be vastly improved by the addition of cartoon sound effects. That's rubbish, actually -- there's nothing capable of making Coldplay sound like anything other than the utter shit they truly are.

"Bring out the T-Rex in you" - You mean I'll start wearing glitter on my face, score a string of hit records, then die in a horrible car crash? I'll have to think on that a bit. Speaking of channeling one's inner T. Rex...

Power Station - Get It On (Bang a Gong) (from Power Station, 1985) - In which the mid-80's supergroup (featuring the late Robert Palmer, the late Tony Thompson, and the understandably worried John Taylor and Andy Taylor) recasts a glam rock masterpiece in durable, non-biodegradable plastic.

"No test, No class, buy yourself Bacheelor MasteerMBA Doctoraate dip1omas" - I wonder if they offer degrees in Americaan Stud1ees, Engliish, or Soc1oloogy? Are there certif1caate prograams available? Is this really the way one should pad one's resuume?

Jetsons - Genetically Stupid (from a 1981 7") - Exceptional Devo-esque punk rawk out of Bloomington, Indiana that has been given much repeat play 'round Armagideon Time HQ.

so many mothers sighing

The Apotheosis of War (1871) by Vasily Vereshchagin
Has it really been five years? Why it seems like only yesterday that the Powers-That-Be were promising to shock and awe their way to victory in Iraq, and that the road to Baghdad would be sprinkled with rose petals and lined with cheering throngs of the newly-liberated grateful.

It was supposed to be an easy and clean war, sanitized and vetted for all-ages consumption. Go in, collect a full suit of psuedo-comically nicknamed war criminals, secure Saddam's stash of death rays and other imaginary superweapons, change the nameplates on the government buildings, and convince the newly installed puppet democratic government to sign over the country's petroleum rights to western interests. After that, it would just be a matter of setting up a few permanent military bases before moving onto to the next chosen recipient of American largess from the barrel of a gun. The costs of rebuilding and occupation were to be paid with the gusher of petroleum revenues anticipated to flow once Iraq had been set on its neoconservatively correct course.

Five years, a half a trillion (a low-ball figure) dollars, and an immeasurable amount of human misery later, American forces are involved in an ugly guerrilla war with no end in sight, with the metrics of progress calibrated to resolve issues that we were assured would not arise. Even the vaunted "surge," with its widely trumpeted "success," is merely a bit of strategic sleight-of-hand to placate dissent on the homefront while failing to accomplish anything of lasting import, and amounts to nothing more than deploying a large bucket brigade to bail out a flooded neighborhood while ignoring the breaches in the levee.

The Iraq War has been such a colossal and unforgivable waste in so many ways, and I can't shake the feeling that future historians will point to the Bush cabal's misadventure in arrogance as the point of America's irreversible decline as a superpower -- a mad fling on borrowed money undertaken without regard for how many lives are wrecked, friendships damaged, and property ruined in the process.

I'd like to hope that the upcoming presidential elections will change things, but unless the Democrats take immediate steps to staunch their self-inflicted internal hemorrhaging, all signs point to a victory in November for John McCain, a man who, despite his (undeserved) reputation as a straight-shootin' maverick, combines the political ethics of Ulysses S. Grant and the geo-political subtlety of Douglas MacArthur.

David Bowie - Five Years (from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972) - I suspect the coming apocalypse will be less literal and more existential in nature -- an endless cycle of degradation, humiliation, and petty cruelties committed simply because there will be nothing else left to do.

but if there is no next time

In this, our first installment of Found Object Theatre, I would like to present a short piece I've titled "The Discreet Charm of the Text Page."


For the musical portion of our program, I present a pair of relevantly-titled tracks -- a subjective alpha and omega of 1970's art-pop, if you will -- by artists whose tremendous influence lingers into the present day.

Roxy Music - Re-Make/Re-Model (from Roxy Music, 1972)

Gary Numan - Random (from The Pleasure Principle, 1979)

don't believe the honeyglaze

Do you know what has a very short shelf life?

Donuts. I bought a cream-filled donut at the bakery Sunday afternoon, and by the time I got a hankering for some greasy goodness on Tuesday morning the surface of the confection was covered in little green spots of mold. The sugar sprinkles were the responsible party; their capacity for absorbing moisture created an ideal environment for rapid spore growth. I was very disappointed by--

--wait, there was someplace I wanted to go with this before I got distracted.

Right, I remembered. The other thing that has a very short shelf life and has generated countless disappointments is shameless hype, the frequently unfounded hard sell presently euphemized as "buzz." I'm not talking about instances of retrological hindsight, like "sporting a whopping 4kb or RAM" or "at thirty-five pounds, this is the PORTABLE adding machine," that offer quaint glimpses into the march of human progress (or painful reminders of reactionary backsliding). I'm talking about "they'll know you've arrived when you show up in a Edsel" or "the long anticipated smash hit follow-up to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours" -- commercial foreplay of the most relentless variety that promises the sun, moon, and stars but results in the most anti-climactic, well, consumer climax upon the unveiling of the final product.


Even the most cynical and jaded among us have been there at some point in our lives. The promises are made, complete with breathy overreaching speculations made by the relevant pundits or authorities backed up with a smattering of cautiously vetted teasers released though official PR channels. Exciting jargon is coined and spread like manure (also known as "bullshit") to better cultivate excitement -- "Featuring unprecedented pixel-deform wraparound compression algorithms" or similar media-specific seduction talk -- which eventually grows and builds to a fever pitch of "NEED NOW! WANT NOW! NO DOUBTS!"


Then the end result lands like a wet turd in one's lap, resulting in a sense of bewilderment born of atrophied critical faculties ("Is it really that bad? Or is it just me?") which eventually leads to anger and disgust when it becomes obvious that, yes, the emperor is completely starkers...and sporting an astonishing number of dingleberries. (Think the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.)


To be fair, that's what marketing is there for -- to make our longings and anticipations override our better judgement. I'm less charitable to representatives of ostensibly independent (looking past questions of access or advertising revenue) media outlets like Entertainment Weekly, EGM, Spin and the like who relish in stoking hype's hellish fires, only to convienently forget their active collusion when the truth inevitably comes out.


The transition between "Jade Empire looks like it will be a groundbreaking videogame experience" and "Jade Empire is on track to be the unquestioned Game of the Year" to a three-out-of-five star review and a "Wow, Jade Empire was overrated bit of mediocrity" retrospective a couple years later takes place in a parallel universe where contrition simply doesn't exist. I cited that example because it was the first that came to mind. It's not exclusive to that particular medium by any stretch. (A certain comics columnist and a certain online movie "reviewer" both come to mind.)

Hey, if I have to live with constant reminders that I once thought Shampoo's "Trouble" was fit for an in-car mix CD, these individuals ought to have the decency to come clean about their roles in pimping House of M or Nickleback to an overly impressionable public.

Less offensive in hindsight but more amusing in shameless shilling and unadulterated hyperbole are the corporate-sanctioned organs of propaganda, publications like Nintendo Power or the late "newsmagazine" Marvel Age which radiate Glengarry-esque levels of desperation and false sincerity. Because, honestly, this...


...evokes more pity (and laughter) than anything else. We're talking about a "redshirt picked by Kirk for an away mission" level of pathos. As a nice bonus, the piece, which ran in Marvel Age #43 (October 1986), did contain what was probably the only Lene Lovich reference to appear in a Marvel publication:


Thomas Dolby did the soundtrack for Howard the Duck, and also wrote the song used as the theme for Misfits of Science? How could that film have been anything but a masterpiece? (Apart from being a completely and utterly misguided disaster right down to the sub-molecular level, that is.)

I guess the point of all the above is to remind people that, given the large array of forces out there whose life work is applying lipstick on pigs, it's in one's best interest to take a closer look at your partner before puckering up. (Also, if you don't plan on eating the donut you purchased right away, store it in a cool, dry place.)

T. Rex - Rip Off (from Electric Warrior, 1971) - Listen to Marc Bolan, for he speaks the truth.

Buzzcocks - Promises (from a 1978 single; collected on Singles Going Steady, 1979) - Even if it's personal, that doesn't mean it has to be taken personally.

Special Bonus Content:

Since I had my old issues of Marvel Age handy, I thought I'd share this little slice of sophomoric joy with you. It's from an article spotlighting the finale of the Vision and Scarlet Witch mini-series. Depending on one's world view, it features either the best or worst choice of words since Giant-Sized Man-Thing...

Friday Night Fights: Nutritional Fisticuffs

Dispensing beatdowns and dietary advice -- you don't see a lot of that kind of full-service superheroics these days.
(from World's Finest Comics #5, Spring 1942; reprinted in 100-Page Super Spectacular DC-18, July 1973)
Mud - Dyna-mite (from Greatest Hits, 1996) - The Brits went ga-ga for early 1970's bubbleglam. The Americans? Not so much, as they were too busy listening to coked-out, overly earnest Malibu millionaries whine about their personal problems via song.

(More powerful than a dozen atomic bombs.)

here is the day to remember

“Herr Michael York, please rest your leonine face against my ample bosoms while I stare uncomfortably into space, ja? Oopsie, it seems the shoulder strap of my dress has slipped down past my creamy white shoulder!”

However will our intrepid hero stop the Kaiser’s latest superweapon, a ponderous behemoth filled with explosive hydrogen gas, powered by volatile aviation fuel, and whose surface is covered with highly combustible reflective paint?

Front Line Assembly – Hydrogen (from Explosion, 2003) – One of my more cherished memories from high school was the time when my 11th grade chemistry teacher miscalculated the blast radius of a hydrogen-filled balloon and singed off the eyebrows of a star member of the football team.

Do Make Say Think – Goodbye Enemy Airship (from Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord Is Dead, 2000) – I’m not sure exactly what the hell “post-rock” is supposed to be, apart from an ineffectual stab at marketing-driven branding. Why not just drop the useless jargon and call it “jazzy electronica with prog tendencies”? The idea with genre labels is to entice or intrigue listeners, not confuse them.

T. Rex – Life’s a Gas (from Electric Warrior, 1971) – The one thing I took away from the first-time homebuyer’s class the bank made my wife and I attend as a precondition for getting a mortgage: Killer mold is the new radon gas. Seriously, the other attendees pissed away nearly ninety minutes asking the instructor the most insane questions about killer mold. “Will it take over my body and make me eat nothing but chocolate-covered mini-donuts?”

I even drew a little picture on one of the class handouts featuring a knife-wielding mass of fungus hovering over a sleeping couple. Now that I think of it, the fungus bore a close resemblance to Marc Bolan’s (or Brian May’s) hairdo – a mass of black curlicues designed to strike fear and awe into the hearts and minds of the unwary.

be a movie star, blah, blah, blah

Huh?
Wha-?
Oh, dear lord….

The above panels are from Iron Man v1 #227, part of the “Stark Wars” (more commonly known as “Armor Wars”) arc from the late 1980’s. Given recent events, I’ve had a hankering to read a story where Tony Stark takes the role of an anti-authoritarian jerk, and these stories have been effective at providing that fix. While it’s a bit overpraised, due to the warm and fuzzy aura of inflationary nostalgia, it remains a fun little read and quaint example of what passed for “badass” behavior in mainstream superhero comics at the time.

It also has those lovely celebrity cameos…. Let’s see, in the top panel we’ve got Lionel Richie (and thank you, Marvel Comics for getting that damn song stuck in my head), a brown-haired (?) Hulk Hogan, and George “Norm” Wendt from Cheers. I’m not sure if the big-haired woman next to Wendt is supposed to be Tina Turner after a coloring mistake or Motley Crue frontman Vince Neill in a dress. Either scenario is possible, I suppose.

In the middle panel, we have Don Johnson, looking very much like a porn star (what, no pastel blue suit?), and a young starlet named “Brie” (God bless the 1980’s!) whose career was given a boost by Stark’s Hollywood connections in a previous issue. No, it’s not what it sounds like – Tony was already engaged in the CCA-approved suggestive bedding of a high-class yuppie caricature named – are you ready for it? – Rae LaCoste. (Not that Brie didn’t try for the brass ring, though. A mullet like Stark’s is hard for the ladyfolk to resist.)

Finally, in the bottom panel we have Michael J. Fox, making one of the worst, self-promoting popcult jokes in comedic history. Other lines considered and rejected for that word balloon included:

“That villain ought to see a doctor – Doc Hollywood!”
“He’s getting his ass handed to him like a casualty of war!”
“Iron Man is really High School USA-ing his ass!”
“Ma-ah-ah-ah-lll…” (That's a reference to Family Ties, not Fox's struggle with Parkinson's Disease. I do have some standards, after all.)

I’m not sure who the other guy in the panel with Fox is supposed to be. If it’s Pierce Brosnan, he must have left his polished exterior in his other suit that morning.

I get what writer David Michelinie and artist Mark Bright were trying to do in this sequence. They were attempting to show the sorts of folks that run in playboy billionaire Tony Stark’s orbit, even if the end result resembled something lifted from an old issue of Cracked magazine.

The whole cult of celebrity eludes me, though. One of my wife’s guilty pleasures is reading the various gossip rags while dining on food from one of the many take-out eateries we frequent. Occasionally, I’ll flip though one of her scandal sheets if I’m bored or waiting for her to get ready in the morning, but the bitchy tone and vicarious obsession with the career trajectories of the stupidly rich and untalented leaves me cold.

However, the concept of celebrity, and its distortive effects on people, fascinates me to no end. Forget the feather, heart, and balances of ancient Egyptian myth; if you want to know the true measure of what lurks in someone’s soul, just give them a few million dollars, some face time, and a personal assistant. The truth will come out every time.

Reel Big Fish – She’s Famous Now (from Why Do They Rock So Hard? 1998) – “She’s like me/just not as ugly.” I don’t know why I love that line, but I do.

Roxy Music – Virginia Plain (from Roxy Music, 1972) – From the deceptively soft opening, to the lack of a chorus, to the astonishingly abrupt end, this is a song calculated to screw with the listener’s expectations. I love it so very much.

Leftfield and Lydon – Open Up (from Leftism, 1995) – I wish John Lydon had done more, either with a refurbished Public Image Limited line up or as solo/collaborative project, to follow up on this exceptional track, which felt like the next logical step in his musical evolution. Instead we got the mercenary efforts of a Mountain Dew commercial and a fairly embarrassing Sex Pistols reunion, while The Prodigy’s Keith Flint did his best Lydon impersonation on 1996’s “Firestarter.” I’m sure the money was grand, John, but was it really worth it?

cold, so cold, without you to hold

Christmas Eve is upon us, and so I’ll close my holiday theme week with Carter USM’s rendition of “Lonely This Christmas” from a 1994 promo single. Mud’s version of this Chinn and Chapman (the Boyce and Hart of 70’s bubbleglam) number went to the top of the UK charts back in 1975, and has become something of a holiday standard on that side of the Atlantic.

This version drops the faux Presleyisms and verses of the original, and instead delivers a brief quasi-acoustic rendition of the chorus that sums up the feeling that many of us have experienced at some point during this time of the year. (But not this holiday season, I hope.)

God Jul och Gott Nytt År, folks! I'm off to leave some tin cans and potato peelings out for the julbock.

Halloween Countdown – October 28 – a scary birthday to Foo

The Fierce and Terrible Queen of Rabbits, also known as “The Funky Foo”, also known as my partner of fifteen years and wife of two, celebrated her birthday today. In honor of this happy event, here are some of her favorite Halloween-themed tracks, all of which coincidentally are from horror movie soundtracks.

At the beginning of each October, my wife pulls out a stack of her favorite horror films to watch. From a pile of around twenty or so DVDs, she usually ends up watching five or six tops, the others getting lost in her hectic schedule. It’s really fun when she decides to pop one into the bedroom DVD player to watch after I’ve already dozed off. She’ll nod off during the opening credits, and I’ll inevitably wake up just as the most disturbing or violent scene of the movie occurs. (I’m lucky this year. The remote for the upstairs DVD is nonfunctional at the moment.)

The Damned – Dead Beat Dance (from The Return of the Living Dead OST, 1985) – The Damned are one of my wife’s favorite bands, and one of her most cherished memories is when she got to hang out with the band after a local show a few years back.

The Undead – Somebody Super Like You (from The Phantom of the Paradise OST, 1974) – Also known as “the Beef construction song,” this is a fun bit of ghoulish glam penned by Paul Williams and performed by the sinister Death Records’ chameleonic house band. (Before their glam/proto-goth turn as The Undead, they appeared as the 50’s nostalgia act The Juicy Fruits and the surf-revivalist Beach Bums, satirically anticipating the shameless demographic pandering of today’s acts by a good couple of decades.)

My wife and I love The Phantom of the Paradise. It’s Brian DePalma at his best (which is faint praise, I admit) and infinitely more enjoyable than the better known Rocky Horror, which has been loaded down with so much fan baggage over the years that it’s hard to get past the taint of its devotees. Kind of like how the nerd hive-mind has conspired to bleed all the enjoyment out of Monty Python’s material.

The Ramones – Pet Sematary (from The Best of the Ramones, 2004) – I was never a big fan of The Ramones, even though I did make the effort to catch them live waaaay back in the day. Their early bubblepunk stuff is enjoyable in small doses, but it gets repetitive fast. My wife, for some reason I’ll never understand, digs their later material, when they ditched the 1-2-3-4 schtick for a Lords of the New Church-style rock sound. I’d rather just listen to London Calling.

who needs TV when I’ve got T. Rex

(alternate title: Electric Warrior in Valhalla)

It was on this day in 1977 that former T. Rex frontman and glam rock pioneer Marc Bolan died in a car crash, two weeks short of his thirtieth birthday. While he may not have had fellow glammer David Bowie’s flair for musical innovation and experimentation, Bolan’s pulsating brand of hard rock boogie epitomized the gorgeous excess associated with the genre.

He was a major influence on the punk and new wave movements. In an interview for The Big Takeover a few years back, Captain Sensible of the Damned had nothing but the highest praise for Bolan, who befriended the band in the time just prior to his death. Echoes of T. Rex’s throbbing, sleazy sound can be heard in scores of tracks recorded by New Romantic and dark synth acts. (Soft Cell, I’m looking at you.)

As a tribute to the man and the legend, here are a couple of my favorite T. Rex tracks, alongside some cover versions of the same:

T. Rex – Children of the Revolution (from a 1972 single, available on the 2001 reissue of Tanx, 1973)

The Fast Set – Children of the Revolution (from a 1980 single)

The Violent Femmes – Children of the Revolution (from The Blind Leading the Naked, 1986)

T. Rex – Telegram Sam (from The Slider, 1972)

Bauhaus – Telegram Sam (from a 1980 single, available on the reissue of In the Flat Field, 1980)

Bonus track:

John’s Children – Desdemona (from The Complete John’s Children, 2002) – This is a 1967 garage rock single featuring Marc Bolan on guitar. The line “lift up your skirt and fly” was highly controversial at the time and effectively killed its shot at UK chart success.

Bonus video clip:

T’ Rex perfoming “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” on live TV. Yes, that’s Elton John on piano: