your kiss is not on the current agenda

This man is clearly a visitor from an alternate universe.
Things that need doing, abridged version:

- get Super Lumina's brake pads replaced
- scale the cherry tree out back and unhook the windchimes before the bad weather starts
- clean off and store the patio furniture
- figure out what I'm going to do with pronounced WOO-BIN
- get my Christmas shopping sorted out before things go crazy
- migrate Armagideon Time to a Wordpress setup on my own webhost
- dig out the sumacs that have snuck their way into the raspberry brambles
- get a haircut
- mail out some packages to my friends
- complete the articles I promised for other sites
- finish sorting and cataloging my popcult archives
- quit kidding myself that making lists will aid me in getting any of the above items done

The Blue Things - You Can't Say We Never Tried (from The Blue Things Story, 1993) - I suppose it depends of what you definition of "tried" is. Mine might be a little more generous than most, and encompasses those transitory flashes of obligation I feel while playing videogames or otherwise procrastinating.

Not that effort automatically equals success, as Kansas's The Blue Things (later "The Bluethings") discovered when their rather nice Byrdsean sound failed to propel the outfit out of the midwestern regional market. Oh, well, there are worse fates than being a well-regarded 1960's garage rock obscurity.

today I need some hate

I'm feeling a little woozy from all the candy I ate last night and still have a ways to go getting the house in order before the wife gets home, so here's an All Saints' Day linkblog post in lieu of actual content.

The best political commentary of this election season.

Satire is not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

Dorian celebrates Dario Argento's works in all their uneven glory.

Bully explains why ham should not be served at weddings.

Speaking hilarious truth to geekdom.

...and, finally, some sad news that I didn't get chance to address during the Halloween Countdown:

Teenage Head frontman, Frankie (Kerr) Venom, died from throat cancer at the age of 51.

Teenage Head - Picture My Face (from Teenage Head, 1979) - Punk at its purest -- hooky, snotty, and exuberant.

peculiar indeed

What's this you say? You're running low on nightmare fuel? No problem, I've got something that should carry you until the next service station of unquiet dreams...


Don't worry about returning the favor, friend. It's the least I could do.

Naz Nomad & The Nightmares - I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) (from Give Daddy the Knife, Cindy, 1984) - In which The Damned's garage-rockin' alter egos barnstorm through the Electric Prunes' psychedelic classic from 1966. Don't let the mediocre reviews by garage rock purists put you off -- this album is retro-revival done right.

Vacation 2008: Epilogue - Just a matter of time

RIDE TOGETHER, DIE TOGETHER.
...and just like that, it's all over.

It's not like I didn't accomplish anything during this past week or so. I built a compost bin. I finally managed to get the patio table out of the basement and onto the patio. I bought a ton of retro-junk that will almost certainly figure into upcoming posts. I got to enjoy New England's first monsoon season (not that Al Gore is right about global warming or anything) from the comfort and safety of my home in the Woburn Highlands.

As bad as playing catch-up as work will be, it's nothing I haven't handled a dozen times before, yet I still can't shake the feeling that my stay of execution is about to elapse. Does the condemned have any last requests? Yes, dispense with the last meal and bring me some fine, fine L.A. power pop to comfort me in my indolence's dying hours...

The Plimsouls - Zero Hour (from The Plimsouls, 1981)

Vacation 2008: Day 4 - The orders are in

(from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! v1 #2, collected in this handy forthcoming omnibus)
The life of a retrologist may be spiritually rewarding, but it doesn't really pay well...or pay at all, actually. To meet my many and varied financial obligations, as well as to support my useless crap habit, I also work as a flagman for data streams at a public university.

It's a perfect job in many ways. It's unionized, pays well, and is generally low stress -- barring the occasional meltdown on the IT end of things. The only catch is that while the flow of work may slacken at off peak times, it never stops and will start to clog things up for the rest of the office without my semi-expert guidance.

This is why I'm getting ready to make the hectic commute into Dorchester to pull a half-shift during the middle of my vacation. I'm hoping by going in late and leaving early I can avoid the usual traffic hassles on I-93....which is a lot like hoping that I'll find a strongbox full of Confederate gold buried underneath the azalea bushes next to my patio.

Black Flag - Clocked In (from The First Four Years, 1984) - It's always time for classic L.A. hardcore.

Wall of Voodoo - Back in Flesh (from Dark Continent, 1981) - The anthem for Generation Avoidance, to be sullenly muttered under one's breath during the long walk from parking lot to cubicle.

Vacation 2008: Day 1 - Ain't gonna gamble

Witch Baby stops the world and melts with you.
The weather has entered devil's armpit territory, so I've decided to postpone my usual roster of Saturday chores and sequester myself in the air-conditioned bedroom along with a choice selection of books, music, and DVDs.

Yes, it's a tragic situation, but I'll just have to learn to live with this meteorologically enforced leisure time.

Sly & The Family Stone - Hot Fun in the Summertime (from Greatest Hits, 1970) - Eternally cool.

Giorgio Moroder - Too Hot to Handle (from From Here to Eternity, 1977) - What the Human League dared to emulate and the basis of Daft Punk's famous discovery.

The Minds - Hot (from Plastic Girls, 2003) - In which we discover the boiling point of raucous, hooky synthpunk.

don't wanna go out tonight

Sage advice, indeed.

And now for a little lazy Sunday linkposting...

The Legomancer casts his deadly (but awesome) spell.

The little stuffed bull crashes the New York Comic Convention.

I'm ashamed I didn't think of the Benjamin's Privates joke first.

Let's go clubbing with Planet Mondo!

Once again, evilolive vists the internet's musty basement so you don't have to.

Oh, Robert, this is how I want to remember you, not the sweat pants, Reeboks, and smeared lipstick that followed.

If you haven't checked out the Vinyl Villain's "45 45's at 45" countdown yet, you really ought to.

The Vapors - Spring Collection (from New Clear Days, 1980) - Back in the days when used vinyl was cheap and plentiful, it was just as easy to pick up an entire LP for the sake of a single desired song as it was to sift through the less organized singles bins of the shops I frequented. It also gave me an opportunity to hear what else a given "one hit wonder" outfit had to offer. While most truly did have just the one bright and shining musical moment, there were a few instances where the material was first-rate from beginning to end, but overshadowed by the luminosity of the band's signature hit.

Modern English's After the Snow (featuring "I Melt With You") is one of those albums, and so is The Vapors' New Clear Days, a top-notch assortment of hooky power pop numbers sadly obscured by the novelty-driven radio success of "Turning Japanese."

life wouldn't be so long

I'm off to finally get this abcessed tooth taken care of. It would have been nice if I wasn't going into the procedure with a raging head/chest cold, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

Visage - Fade to Grey (from Visage, 1980) - All roads lead to entropy...and hopefully the wamth and comfort of my bed once this nonsense is over.

days of wine and roses

I'm too busy tossing paperclips at my current sword of Damocles to cobble together anything substantive at the present time, so I hope you won't be too disappointed if I gear down into low content mode until next Wednesday.

And so, without further ado, I present this pair of advertisements culled from Young Love #112 (October-November 1974):

Lesson #1: Write a short paragraph in which you promise easy money in exchange for minimal effort.
Lesson #2: Run the paragraph as an ad in a periodical where the audience is known to be somewhat impressionable and lacking better judgement.
Lesson #3: Kick back, rake in the cash, and read up on offshore banking schemes.

Placed directly underneath the above ad was this minimalist appeal to "the kidz":

LIKE GUNZ? HATE EVERYBODY? WANT YOUR FACE ON THE TEN O'CLOCK NEWZ? You'll LOVE Schoolstoppers Textbook 2008 Edition! You pay us 25 cents, then you make them all pay!

A Popular History of Signs - Halcyon Days (from Comrades, 1984) - Some subdued synthwave for a rather cold and gray day. This is April, right? Because I am sure as heck not feeling it.

you know you're wasting your time

Mr. Morris, the owner of radio station WHIZ, finds himself in dire financial straits:

"But how could this happen, sir?"
"Well, you see, Billy, there's this place called the Emperor's Club, and..."
Shrugging off Billy Batson's optimistic bromides as the empty platitudes they really are, Morris decides to flee the country before the inevitable subpoenas start arriving. He decamps at a South Sea island refuge popular with other fugitives from life's petty hassles...

"This place is heaven on earth! What's it called?"
"The natives call the place Enewetak. Don't mind those warships moored offshore; the Navy boys are supposed to be doing some kind of 'test' or something."
...and Morris becomes quickly enthralled with his new low-stress lifestyle, which is refreshingly free of FCC hearings, incipent ulcers, and impossible-to-please sponsors.

Before Morris can get too comfy, however, Billy dispatches his superheroic alter ego, Captain Killjoy Marvel, to shake some Protestant work ethic back into his underachieving boss:

"To blazes with your personal well-being, little man! The cult of Mammon does not treat apostates lightly!"
Marvel fails to convince Morris to quit his hedonistic idyll, and even begins to succumb to the island's seductive allure himself...

The Captain Marvel version of Thoreau's Walden took some major liberties with the source material.
...though he is fortuitously saved by the giant stick wedged up his ass. Unwilling to give up his missionary work on behalf of stifling conformity, Marvel again approaches Morris about his un-American behavior. This time, however, the Big Red Cheese makes use of visual aids to prove his case, confronting Morris with his eventual fate should he decide to remain on the island...

"...and what's worse, my friend, you'll begin thinking that Terrapin Station is a work of true genius."
"DEAR LORD, NOOOOOOOO!"
....devolution into a smelly hippie. A fate worse than death, indeed. The shocking revelation convinces Morris to violently repudiate his slacker ways and return to whatever fate awaits him back in the civilized world:

"I refuse to accept the existence of a paradise that includes slightly unruly facial hair!"
As it turns out, the music Morris must face is the "Crony Capitalism Rag," a perrenial plutocratic standard composed by the Old Boy Network. I haven't been personally privileged enough to hear the piece performed live, but I believe the first two lines are "If you're rich and white/it will turn out all right":

"So, Morrie-baby, I've got to process a stack of foreclosures against some working class families this afternoon, but if you're not busy this evening, I know of this place called the Emperor's Club..."
(From "Man's Worst Enemy" from Captain Marvel Adventures #91, December 1948; by Otto Binder & C.C. Beck)

Deadbeats - Kill the Hippies (from a 1978 single) - A fine piece of early L.A. punk that pits the hollowness of trangressive nihilism against the self-righteousness of narcissistic "enlightenment."

The Specials - Rat Race (from More Specials, 1980) - "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that." - Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything

don't need the masters

It's an all right place to visit, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

Today was supposed to be fairly quiet and uneventful, what with the wife away negotiating the cosplay-and-body-odor-heavy seas of the Anime Boston convention and little old me being left to my own devices here at our house on the hill.

Not that I'm unhappy with how things turned out. I could have done without the family hassles which manifested themselves and the dinnertime encounter with the Church of Latter-Day Saints' black-suited community outreach program. The visit from my brother was a nice surprise, though, especially as it included the gift of a stack of old Marvel comics from the 60's and 70's and a marathon sibling co-op session of the Xbox 360 version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

The Pillows - Little Busters (from Little Busters, 1998; also available on Fooly Cooly OST 1: Addict, 2004) - I didn't accompany Maura to today's convention because that particular form of salinity lost its savor for me sometime in the early 1990's. It was a combination of popcult saturation fatigue (coupled with the ubiquitous shallow Japanophilia in the fan scene) and the simple fact that my personal tastes and prevailing trends in manga and anime have diverged a great deal over the years. (I'm an unreconstructed old school mecha jockey and space opera enthusiast.)

There are a lot of things of note out there at the moment, but very little that appeals to me personally with the exception of occasional works like Youtsuba&! or the not-that-recent, but wonderfully bizarre FLCL, which featured today's song (as well as several other gems) by the Japanese indie rock outfit The Pillows on its soundtrack.

beat the clock

In case you've forgotten the drill, I'll explain it so even Chris Sims could understand it...

SPRING FORWARD!
FALL BACK!
The first couple days following the legislatively-mandated tinkering with the natural temporal order are always the worst. The extra hour of daylight is nice enough, I suppose, but it's certainly not worth having to get up an hour earlier.

The KLF - What Time Is Love? (LP Mix) (from The White Room, 1991) - The simplest way to shake off the daylight savings blues is to crank up The JAMs, melonfarmers! Trust in the Timelords, for they possess wisdom far beyond what the minds of mere mortals could comprehend.

want to move like this and that

It's clear that this gentleman never visited North Woburn in the early 1980's.

One memory that will always haunt my dreams is of the time my friends and I decided to walk to the Woburn Mall by cutting behind the industrial park and following the Boston & Maine railroad tracks beside the chemical plant. The tracks ran roughly parallel to the Aberjona River, which at that stretch of the not-even-close-to-mighty waterway devolved into a series of interconnected ponds and reed marshes.

It was the middle of winter, so we figured we could shave some time of the trip by walking across the frozen surface of one of the larger ponds. The water wasn't more than a couple feet deep at the center, and considerable less so at the edges, and the ice was exceptionally translucent. Beneath it was a Lovecraftean swirl of colors and vegetative shapes utterly alien to New England environs -- day-glo magenta and mustard fronds and kelp-like water foliage, which in hindsight were probably chemical accretions rather than actual living plants, but were still incredibly unsettling to behold.

Right, the purpose of this post was not to explain why my corpse will most likely need to be interred in a lead-lined concrete casque, but to indulge in another round of linkposting, the lazy blogger's ever-reliable friend.

Say it ain't so, Kylie! Parte deux! Both Blanka and Donna Summer were unavailable to comment.

In case you want to know where all the cool kids will be tomorrow night.

Always an excellent course of action. (Also, the weft and warp of the Apocalypse revealed!)

My wife's family came right off the boat, and they can't stand the damned song.

Feeling uptight on a Saturday night? Nine o'clock, the radio's the only light? Lacking caffeine and feeling blue? Dr. K visited a place that's ideal for you.

There is nothing I can add to the discussion that hasn't been said already.

Sparks & Jane Wiedlin - Cool Places (from In Outer Space, 1983) - Enthrallingly irritating yet catchy in the magnificent Sparks manner.

oh, the places you will go

Remember when I said that I wouldn't ever do a linkpost?

I lied.

Geez, Thor, it's not that big a deal....

A planet well worth exploring.

Dave reviews Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha in its entirety; as a consequence, Andrew now wants to read Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha in its entirety.

Say it ain't so, Kylie!

You have until Sunday to enter Ken's Oscar Oscar Revolution contest. So hop to it, kids!

I'll work all week to buy you things, even if I'm too tired at the end of the day to remember what you look like.

An old salt recounts his epic journey through the Shoals of Twenty-something. (I burned my boat on Underachiever Island's tropical shore long ago.)

The link between Defender and Deutscher new wave revealed.

Better than the Sears Wish Book. (Alternately, I can dream about you, if I can't hold you tonight.)

I would just like to point out that my birthday is coming up in a matter of weeks.

The B-52's - Roam (from Cosmic Thing, 1989) - Senior year was a long, long time ago, but this song doesn't seem to have aged one bit. It's all in the cheekbones, I'm told.

1-2-3 happy neighborhood

Sunday is a day of rest...and at Armagideon Time, it's also a day of lazy music video posts.

Reel Big Fish - Sell Out

Carter USM - Do Re Mi So Far So Good

I wonder if I could pull off having a haircut like Jim Bob's at my age... I'm very tempted to try even if my bangs don't curl.

make no mistake

I'm taking a break today, for reasons I may or may not discuss tomorrow.

Here's something to tide you over until then:

just another story

Normally, a day off work would mean an opportunity to work up a longer and more substanital post, but since this particular day was spent shoveling a couple cubic tons of heavy wet snow, I'm going to take easy way out.

Here's a little gem culled from the "Chatter" column of the November 22, 1982 issue of People magazine (cover story: "Mick and Jerry Split"; the mag's previous owner drew a mustache on Ms. Hall, along with an "I love fat old millionaires" heart tattoo on her arm.)


As a bit of dated celebrity gossip, it's amusing in it's own right. More importantly, it also serves as an appropriately depressing and absurd obituary for the last moribund vestiges of the 60's counter-culture.

You say you want a revolution? Sorry, chum, I'm too busy practicing my backhand swing and moaning about the generation gap. Besides, my portfolio of assets isn't going to manage itself.

The Clash - Death or Glory (from London Calling, 1979) - I struck my bargain with the world for a complete collection of Animotion 45's. I don't want to boast or anything, but it's easy to see who got the better end of that deal.

The Dishrags - Sold Out (from Love/Hate, 1997) - Femvox punk from the early Vancouver scene. Joe Strummer liked them. I do, too.

the name of the game

I'm going to be busy today picking up the threads of workaday life I left dangling during my recent ordeal, so pardon me if I resort to a cheap, decontextualized gag for today's post...

...say, for instance, the "lost" Hulk clip from VH-1's I Love the 80's: Uncalled Four?
I don't know why the producers didn't use it it the show. It's light-years more insightful than Loni Love's ("This was a CUBE named RUBIK and EVERYONE was just CRAZY about it.") or Henry Rollins's (insert overreaching attempt at too-cool-for-school edginess here) segments.

All that's missing is a tangentially-related 80's track used as background music.

Kim Wilde - Chequered Love (from Kim Wilde, 1981)

There you go.

(The sequence actually comes from the final issue of Blip, Marvel's short-lived attempt at cashing in on the early 80's videogame craze. It's a subject that I'd like to mock examine in depth eventually, but not today.)

tonight I can't hold a pen

Following up on yesterday's post:

I've scheduled a consultation visit for tomorrow afternoon, with the procedures to be performed on Wednesday. The discernible sense of urgency in my dentist's voice was a little alarming, but there's nothing I can do about it but hang in there for the next 72 hours. I never thought I'd ever type these words, but I'm actually looking forward to having a root canal.

Because I'm presently distracted by the pain-related lack of sleep and dark thoughts regarding the pair of vice grips in my tool box, I'm going into low-content mode for the next couple of days.

First up, I'm going to write up a prescription for a topical lowbrow palliative...

(from "All the World's a Stooge," 1941)
...to be followed with administration of a soothing musical balm:

The Replacements - Can't Hardly Wait (from Pleased To Meet Me, 1987) - Wester-borg speaks the truth. I'm looking forward to Wednesday like it was Christmas, only with fewer presents and more pulpy nerve tissue scraped out my pearly off-whites.

no room for ravers

I'm feeling a little wiped today, what with the time change and the staying up late last night playing videogames and so forth, and there's simply no way I'll be able to compose anything worth reading today.

Maybe one of the "kids" 'round here would be willing to pinch hit for me. So how about it, Carmen? Feel like writing today's post?

Hmmm...fine, then. What about you, Oscar?

No, I understand, little man. Sioux, wanna give it a shot?

That's cool, don't bother getting up. Witch Baby? Adeline? Are you two up to collaborating on something?

I see. Well, at least I know I can count on Jem; he's always such a bundle of energy and...

...oh, well. So much for "Plan B."

The Toy Dolls - Lazy Sunday Afternoon (from Covered in Toy Dolls, 2002) - A wonderfully loopy cover of the Small Faces' classic ode to weekend indolence and exaggerated Cockney accents (the actual title of which is simply "Lazy Sunday," but why waste time nitpicking?)