Vacation 2008: Day 3 - Give me fyah

Look what I got in the mail last Saturday!

The 25th anniversary edition of Barbecue, the G.I. Joe team's resident firefighter! Or more accurately, the G.I. Joe team's rezahdint fy-ah-fy-tah and token Bostonian.

Lady Jaye's file card states she was born in the Vineyard, but it's safe to assume that she was a high holiday baby with a permanent address in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Gabriel "Bahbahcue" Kelly, on the other hand, was the real fictional deal, a seventh generation Beantown jake presumably well versed in the local culture of fradulent disability reports and lack of independent oversight.

"I'd love tah help ya fight Cobra Cammandah, Duke, but my back's been actin' up. Union rules. Maybe when I get back from rock climbin' I can do somethin'."

While the general wisdom regarding special forces operatives stresses cross-training (so that the units can function effectively despite loss of individual members), the Joes were hyper-specialized to a fault, with full-time team members dedicated solely to covering even the most narrow of disciplines. In practice, this meant that many of the less well-rounded members of the team either spent most of their time warming the benches back at the Joes' HQ or got dragged along on missions outside their areas of expertise, leading to absurd scenarios like Snow Job, an arctic warfare expert, fighting in full cold weather gear in the tropics. Call it the "licensed merchandise theory of warfare."

For poor Barbecue -- armed with a hi-tech supersoaker and a fire axe -- the time not spent inspecting the base's smoke detectors and spinkler systems went something like this...


An important function, to be sure, but it doesn't dull the gnawing feelings of inadequacy when the other guys and gals on the team are doing some post-op boasting about how many Rattlers they shot down or how they kicked Destro in the 'nads while leaping from an exploding A.W.E. Striker.

In the overfondly remembered G.I. Joe cartoon series, Barbecue's great shining moment came in "The Viper Is Coming," a episode revolving around the title's ominous warning and culminating, as these things usually do, with an Eastern European gentleman arriving to "vipe the vindows."

Yes, for real. So fuck your rose-tinted childhood nostalgia, fanboys. All the perfumes in Araby can't mask the pungent stink of 80's toy cartoons.

The episode did treat the public, however, to another interesting popcult attempt to duplicate the Bay State's distinctive regional accent. It goes about as well as you'd expect, as demonstrated by this fan-edited trip into the poorly-synched mouth of madness...

Now while there are certain Snagglepussean overtones in the Charlestown variant of the Boston accent (which I suspect is the real reason behind the Townies' famous "Code of Silence"), I can state with a reasonable degree of authority that we do not speak like the "confirmed bachelor" character actor lovechild of Phil Silvers and Jack Haley. (Haley, along with Ray Bolger, did happen to hail from Beantown, but even so...)

(Also, I don't want to read too much into things, but the personality profile on Barbecue's file card states, and I quote, "He can...wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart Coke bottle." Fancy that.)

Dude, I know you're tired of "pahk the cah" jokes, but the white boy ebonics thing is not the answer.
For the musical portion of today's post, I decided to keep things nice and local...

The Cars - It's All I Can Do (from Candy-O, 1979) - As long as it's done well, I won't complain.

The Pixies - Dig for Fire (from Bossanova, 1990) - This is Boston, not Centralia. I still haven't warmed up to The Pixies, as the psychic scars inflicted by the various fans of the band are still tender after almost twenty years, though I can appreciate the music...in small doses...in the rare proper context.

love me, love my action figure collection

“It never would have worked out. I caught her trying to file her Fried Green Tomatoes DVD after my copy of John Carpenter’s The Fog.”

Is this really an issue? And if it is, shouldn’t the couples involved be forced to separate, if not for their own sakes, then for the sake of the gene pool?

Every successful relationship comes down to series of compromises -- some large, some small -- concerning personal quirks and preferences that weave themselves into the fabric of the partnership, so that over time the actual boundaries fade into the background of consensual habit. Granted, some behaviors are more bothersome than others, but if you’ve chosen to partner up with someone who is habitually late for events, you weigh the irritation factor versus your affection for said partner and either learn to deal with it or decide to call it a day and move on. There’s always the chance of flare ups within the contested zones, but if the relationship is solid, these function as tension release valves or minor corrective efforts, and not fault lines from which bad break ups arise.

Relationship issues over merging media collections, though? That’s just plain stupid. I know there are some folks who are outright anal about keeping a cross-referenced and spreadsheet-tabulated archive of their books, CDs, and DVDs, but isn’t that the sort of thing a romantic partner would figure out early on in a relationship and accommodate for accordingly? There will always be adherents of the “I can change him or her” school who will play along until the pact is formally sealed (although I’d argue that such antics encode their own seeds of self-destruction), but when you fall in love with a person who, for example, is absolutely devoted to her pet rabbits, it’s unrealistic to think “Hey, I’ll try and convince her that rabbits are terrible pets, and that any home we make together will be lagomorph-free!” Again, it’s all about the willingness to accommodate or compromise, if you think a certain person is destined to be “the one.”

Maybe the columnists were being squeezed by a deadline, and needed some quick fluff to fill space, but the technicalities of merging possessions seem like something that any two people in a working relationship should have been able to figure out prior to living together. Kind of like how I instinctively know what songs to avoid when assembling a mix CD for the wife’s and my work commute, or why I never even raised the question of whether or not we were going to hang the gatefold poster cover of Crass’s Feeding the 5000 (a photo of a desiccated hand tangled in barbed wire, with the caption “Your country needs you” in big block letters) on the living room wall. Besides, unless you lead an extremely Spartan lifestyle or plan on moving into an eighteen room mansion, it’s highly unlikely that there will be enough room both your and your partner’s accumulated masses of stuff.

In our case, it was an organic affair, where we tossed all our stuff into massive piles in the attic, and gradually pulled things from the mess as needed and/or wanted. Anime artbooks share space with graphic novels, history and science texts with sci-fi and horror paperbacks, DVD box sets with Xbox and PS2 games. At the moment, our endtable is groaning under a stack of issues of Shojo Beat, a coffee table book on videogames, and my old Traditions of Western Drama anthology from college, with no Congress of Vienna-style negotiations required. The contents of our communal CD racks have developed along similar lines; various personal favorites cohabitate side by side with no fear of musical cootie contagion.

Vive le difference, and all that. Keeping in the spirit of things, here are two tracks pulled from two neighboring discs, one from one of Maura’s favorites and one from mine, with neither of us seeing the appeal of the other’s selection…

Nina Hagen – Russian Reggae (from …In Ekstasy, 1985) – I just don’t get it, but the wife loves Frau Hagen’s colorfully far-out punk/pop/sci-fi stylings. She even wants to name our first daughter “Nina Marlene Roxy” after Hagen, and her two other musical heroes: Lene Lovich and Roxy Epoxy. It’s a much better choice than “Kayleigh” or “Madison,” I concede.

Throwing Muses – The River (from House Tornado, 1988) – The Muses are an “eh” from Maura, who associates them with the more irritating and pretentious fans she used to know back in the late 80’s (not as much as she does with The Pixies, who are beyond the pale, as far as she’s concerned; a feeling I happen to share with her). I enjoy the band’s quirky, opaque brand of indie rock, though I prefer to ride the sonic currents of their songs and not seek deeper truths in their lyrics.

this is your conscience speaking

What’s this? Two posts in a single day? Yeah, because I felt the anniversary of Joe Strummer's death deserved more than a couple of lines appended to a hastily written clarification of intent.

I don’t gush about much of what I post here. For one, I’m a WASP, and as Mystery Science Theater so eloquently put it, “emotions are for ethnic people.” Another reason is that I am painfully self-conscious that distinctions between good and bad, great and awful ultimately rest in the eyes and ears of the beholder. I don’t care much for Morrissey or The Smiths, but their music means the world to some people. Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” evokes strong feelings of wistful nostalgia in me whenever I hear it, while others only hear the epitome of bland corporate 70’s rock.

It’s not a conscious rational process, for the most part. I can give reasons why I think White Heat’s “Nervous Breakdown” is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard, but none could ever fully explain the chills I get down my spine when the chorus starts. It’s what makes music mean so much to us, that visceral connection between the work and the listener. The best I can hope to achieve is to trace the outlines of the Platonic shadows the songs cast….

…and make fun of songs and performers I can’t stand with gleeful abandon.

When folks ask me, “What’s you’re favorite band?” I usually respond with “Right now I’m listening to…” and leave it at that. Being a novelty junkie means that my tastes are in a perpetual state of flux. There is one constant though, and that is The Clash.

It was my punk rock mentor, the cook at the hospital I worked at in high school, who convinced me to pick up the band’s first album instead of another LP of the standard hardcore dreck I was listening to at the time. It was the best music purchase I’ve ever made. From the opening chords to “Clash City Rockers” (lifted, I later discovered, from The Who’s “Can’t Explain” to the abrupt cutout at the end of “Garageland,” I was completely blown away by the mix of killer hooks and indignant sense of conviction delivered by the band. It was the music I had been waiting to hear, but didn’t realize existed. It seemed so perfect…

…until I purchased a copy of London Calling and got schooled all over again.

While he shares credit with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and the various drummers who cycled through the band for making The Clash “the only band that mattered” (for a short time, at least), Joe Strummer will always be, in my mind, the soul of the band. You can see it in the live performance footage. The conviction he radiated was tempered by a trace of uncertainty in his facial expressions, as if he was considering the meaning of each line as he sung them, or wondering if the message was being obscured by the medium.

He lost the thread for a good while, and paid the price for his arrogance, trying to rekindle past glories while Jones (through Big Audio Dynamite) kept up with the now. Others copped onto Strummer’s rebel rocker formula and rode it to massive success, while he was left on the sidelines to mutter and rant to an audience that long since moved on.

In the years just prior to his death, Strummer seemed reenergized. He was more humble, willing to acknowledge his past mistakes, and prepared to go forward with his new band. It was a welcome return to form, cut short by his tragic passing on this day in 2002.

The Clash – Safe European Home (from Give ‘em Enough Rope, 1978) – Fuck “Planet of Sound.” My anti-Pixies bias aside, this track outrocks that noisy excuse for a song by a good dozen orders of magnitude. The opening alone, which swoops down on the listener like a Spitfire on a strafing run, is proof positive of my claim. Any piker can throw a cat on a fretboard and call it art, but I’ll take airtight precision and killer hooks over that nonsense any day of the week.

Here’s The Clash performing the song at the 1983 US Festival: