resistance of memory

(from Marshal Law #6, April 1989; by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill)
Memory is useless if it fails to engender wisdom.

The Pogues - The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (from Rum Sodomy & the Lash, 1985)

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

are visions but only illusions

Because I've seen this issue come up in more than a few places recently, I feel that it's my duty as a retrologist to set things straight.

The Good Old Days, as seen through a nostalgia filter:


The Good Old Days, as seen through the lens of reality:


I think the point is rather self-evident, but let's use another example that carries a bit more personal resonance for the post-boomer demographic.

How we'd like to remember "those days":

How we truthfully remember "those days":



Yeah, I realize I just violated the music bloggers' equivalent to the Geneva Convention there, but drastic problems call for drastic solutions. Nothing can be ruled out. We must be prepared to use any and all options at our disposal, even if it means injecting a disconcerting double shot of classic postpunk into your recalcitrant cortices.

Joy Division - I Remember Nothing (from Unknown Pleasures, 1979)

Public Image Limited - Memories (from Metal Box, 1979)

listen to me, listen to me

When I was eight years old, my paternal grandmother and my father's youngest sister moved in with us. The reasons for it were kind of complicated, but can summed up by saying that my grandfather wasn't nearly as good a scam artist as he thought he was, and when the bill for his various hustles came due he fled the state rather than face the music. It was left to my parents to pick up the pieces, which included cramming two more bodies -- an addle-minded stroke victim with delusions of misremembered grandeur and a teenage girl -- into our already cramped North Woburn apartment.

Though my parents' clashing insanities were the ultimate cause of my familiy's implosion, I've long held it was that fucked up domestic paradigm shift that sent things teetering down the path to disaster.

But the the point of explaining that chapter of my life was not to induge in a round of Dysfunctional Family Follies: The Weiss Edition, but to bring up an incidental aspect of the period. As I said, the new arrangement brought an instant older "sister" into my life in the form of my aunt, five years my senior. Prior to her arrival in the house, my musical tastes reflected those of my parents and childhood peers, which meant the Beatles, too much 70's singer-songwriter and soft rock, and AC/DC. Oh, and the Grease soundtrack, which was nigh-unavoidable in schoolyard circles back then.

My aunt was not a punk rocker or new waver by any stretch of the imagination, but she was a teenybopper who listened to a lot of rock radio at a period when bands in those genres could be heard fairly often on either the local mainstream rock stations or the fledgling local "alternative" station, WFNX. Because I was young, impressionable, and sharing the same confined space with my aunt, the songs and bands I heard then imprinted themselves indelibly on my subconscious mind. Not in a radical life- or taste-changing way -- I was too busy obsessing over X-Men comics and Dig Dug, and my punk fandom wouldn't begin until my late teens -- but in a true IPCRESS fashion, unexploded mnemonic ordnance lying dormant in anticipation of the correct trigger sequences.

It's why, when I bought a copy of The Clash's debut album in the late 1980's, I discovered that I already knew the lyrics and chord progressions by heart. It's also why, when listening to my custom new wave playlist on Christmas Eve, I felt like someone tossed me under the suppressed memory train after hearing these two tracks back to back:

The Swingers - Counting the Beat (from Counting the Beat, 1981) - Oh, what glorious cocktail of backbeats and understated elegance. Formed from the Phil (ex-Split Enz) Judd faction of New Zealand's Suburban Reptiles, The Swingers also appeared and performed in Gillian Armstrong's 1982 new wave musical Starstruck (which will be spotlighted in a upcoming post now that I have my USB turntable).

Fischer-Z - So Long (from Going Deaf for a Living, 1980) - One thing that's great about pop music is that a skilled performer can take a perfectly obnoxious concept like self-pity and turn it into a thing of genuine pathos and beauty...

...which a less musically talented person feeling similiar emotions can listen to while sobbing into his pillow, punching parking meters or writing incoherent, wounded screeds on his MySpace page.

you’ll dream of microwaves tonight

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself contemplating the parallels between Bridezillas and the “two minutes hate” of Orwell’s 1984, when I happened to jog loose a random memory about a story I read in grade school. It was about a future society where the populace was kept in line though a ubiquitous food additive that made those who ingested it susceptible to subliminals embedded in the (government-controlled) television broadcasts. A teenage chemistry whiz manages to unravel the secrets of the totalitarian state’s social control program, but like Winston Smith, ends up learning the hard way that you can’t fight city hall Big Brother.

The story disturbed me immensely when I first read it a sci-fi anthology that had been collecting dust in the back of my fifth grade classroom, and even over the space of twenty-plus years, I felt a small chill when I recalled it. The titles of the story and the anthology eluded me, and the book itself was most certainly consumed in the fire that destroyed that wing of my elementary school in the mid-eighties. (Along with the school library’s copy of an absolutely stunning retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey illustrated with Greek urn-inspired watercolor paintings that now goes for a small fortune online. If only I had been bold enough to commit petty larceny in my formative years…)

I did, however, remember the name of the breakfast cereal in the story that piques the doomed student’s curiosity: “Biskies.” Armed with that small lead, I popped onto the internet to see what Google could uncover for me. Based on the results returned, it seemed that I was not the only child traumatized by the story, which turned out to be “A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” by Raymond F. Jones. It appeared in The Other Side of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Stories About Young People in the Future published by Random House in 1973. A quick check of half.com, my usual go-to site for cheap out-of-print books, turned up a reasonable-priced copy which was promptly ordered by yours truly and delivered a week or so later by the USPS.

The style of the book mirrors that of those Alfred Hitchcock horror and suspense anthologies (Monster Museum, Haunted Houseful, et cetera) that used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was a wee lad, and the book itself seems like an attempt to spin off the format into the science fiction realm. (Plugs for several of the Hitchcock anthologies appear on the inside of the dustjacket’s back endleaf, which supports my theory.) I managed to finish the entire book in a single evening’s reading, and it was fascinating to discover how much of the material I remembered, misremembered, or just plum forgot over time.

Many of the online commentaries about The Other Side of Tomorrow make note of the generally bleak tenor of the stories considering the target audience, but I’d have to respond by saying it was published at a time when bleakness in was in vogue. For all its prognosticative window-dressing, science fiction is most usually rooted in the issues and concerns of the “now,” which is why the art-deco alien cities of 1930’s sci-fi and the chrome and neon Nippon-ocentric worlds of 1980’s cyberpunk novels appear kitschy and quaint these days.

1973, the year The Other Side of Tomorrow was published, was smack dab in the middle of a period I’ve informally dubbed The Great Disillusionment, a mass crisis of faith in the wake of the failures of both the Establishment and the counterculture to effectively respond to changing times. The war in Vietnam, race riots, Kent State, the growing concern over the state of the environment, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the stagnation of real wages, the assertion of and resistance to the demands by historically marginalized groups for equal rights, the violent implosion of the counterculture movement – these events formed the tapestry that serves as the contextual background for The Other Side of Tomorrow, and in light of that fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t an even bleaker read.

Not all of the stories are grim in tone. Thomas N. Scortia’s “Final Exam” is a straightforward adventure story with overtones similar to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series or even the 60’s Green Lantern comic book tales. “Night of the Millennium” by Edward D. Hoch is an adventure-mystery yarn set in the last few hours of the year 1999, where the writer envisions a future where fifteen year olds are considered independent adults (as opposed to a world where twenty- and thirty-somethings attempt to prolong their adolescence indefinitely).

Arthur Tofte’s “The Speeders” is a reiteration of Lord of the Flies by way of Harlan Ellison’s “Along the Scenic Route,” as teenage repeat offender speed freaks (of the vehicular, not the meth-head, sort) are shuttled off to a prison camp where they can fatally indulge their lead feet. It’s not a happy story, by any stretch, but the main characters don’t really elicit the reader’s sympathy, leaving one to feel that they’re just paddling toward a foregone conclusion.

Both Joseph Green’s “Let My People Go!” and J. Hunter Holly’s “The Others” deal with the plight of throwbacks and mutations in worlds where genetic enhancement is the norm. Holly’s story is the better of the two, and features real moments of pathos (whereas the first person narrator in Green’s story is too clinically detached to be taken seriously as a believable character), but both tales end with a sense of hope for the outcasts’ future.

I found Leigh Brackett’s “Come Sing the Moons of Moraven” and Gail Kimberly’s “Peace, Love, and Food for the Hungry” of particular interest because they both address the issues of the sixties’ youth movement in a direct and unromantic manner through the premise of young folks attempting, and failing, to create off-world utopias. The young colonists in Brackett’s story are highly-educated, highly-motivated pioneers whose earnest dreams come up against and immutable force of nature. The communal society of Kimberly’s story finds itself being crushed alive by their own demons, embodied by a rapidly multiplying mass of alien lifeforms that feed on the colonists’ negative emotions, which are in ample supply despite their frequently-mouthed “love the brother” homilies. The vectors of delivery may be science-fiction tales, but the echoes of Great Disillusionment loom large over both stories, specifically the death of the dream via unyielding external pressures (Chicago 1968) or the internal seeds of self-destruction (the Manson Family murders and the rise of militant factions, plus the seamy side of the free love and drug cultures). It’s depressing stuff, but absolutely of its time.

The two dystopian future tales, the previously mentioned “A Box of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” and Gordon Eklund’s “Examination Day” are both unremittingly bleak, but that’s par for the course in dystopian fiction, whose appeal lies in painting a really grim (and ostensibly cautionary) picture of the possible shapes of things to come, especially when it extrapolates based on present trends, hothousing problematic acorns into terrifyingly twisted giant oak trees. “Biskies” is by far the better story in terms of premise and execution, but the core concept of “Examination Day” – in a society where careers are determined by the state, how does one deal with being selected to oversee a concentration camp? – is strong enough to carry the tale despite several awkward missteps by the author. I once read an essay (and I wish I could remember where) that the overarching theme in fiction about adolescence is that of acknowledging limits, bartering the dreams of youth for the realities of adulthood at a really lopsided rate of exchange – and nowhere has the rate of exchange been as lopsided as in “Examination Day.”

If there’s a current of grimness in there stories, it’s one in sync with the tone of that era of young adult fiction from Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War to Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah to Paul Zindel’s The Pigman to the works of S.E. Hinton and even M.E. Kerr (Not to mention Jack Thomas’s teen trash classic Heavy Number, which is as close an American equivalent to Richard Allen’s Skinhead novels as one can find.) Given the reactionary trends of the past three decades, it may seem harsh stuff to market to kids, but, speaking from personal experience, the kids are a lot tougher than the grown-ups give them credit for being, and there are worse things than being given an opportunity to think about big issues, rather than spoon feeding them aseptic escapist fare in hopes of delaying the inevitable.

The Epoxies – No Interest (from Stop the Future, 2005) – Maura brought home the new Epoxies EP the other day. I’m not sure what I think about it, yet. There’s a decent enough Wipers’ cover, a formerly iTunes-exclusive bonus track from Stop The Future, and two new songs that are slower and more experimental than anything previously released by the band.

Max Frost and The Troopers – Shape of Things to Come (from Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, 1998) – A repost from last year’s cult movie-themed post, but too perfect a fit to pass on.

The B-52’s – Song for a Future Generation (from Whammy! 1983) – Hello, I’m Andrew, I’m a Pisces! I like nectarines and writing long, self-conscious blog posts!

clubbed to death

"It is such a quiet thing to fall…but far more terrible is to admit it." – Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

A lot of what I babble about here touches upon the associative power of music, especially the connection between music and memory. Sometimes the triggers are direct and/or nostalgia-related, like how listening to Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend,” excruciatingly trite as it may be, unleashes a torrent of non-specific memories of childhood summers in North Woburn. Other times, it’s a more subtle process, where upon hearing a song for the first time, a random half-forgotten chunk of memory gets shaken loose from my internal data store. It’s a bit like the IPCRESS process, but accidental and through pop music, rather than deliberate and through starvation and psychedelic light shows.

The specific instance which spawned this post was a case of the latter, more subtle, process. After coming across a track on Retro Music Snob (which if you aren’t a frequent visitor to, you ought to be – and I’m not saying that because RMS frequently links to me) by The Holograms, an all-female bubblegum punk pop band from Los Angeles, I headed on over to eMusic and picked up a copy of their album. Their music is an entertaining, and somewhat raunchy, crazy quilt of influences ranging from the Shangri-La’s to The Pandoras to the Lunachicks to the Go-Go’s early stuff, and I recommend it highly.

About thirty seconds into “Scene Whore,” I suffered a major flashback to an incident from about five years back. After I started driving again in the fall of 2001, Maura and I quickly settled into certain day-specific routines. Fridays became pizza and animal supplies days. We’d drive to the Pet Supplies Plus in Wellington Circle, stock up on all the necessities for the critters, then head off to pick up our food order at Antonio’s over by the Fellsway. The place was a traffic nightmare, so I used to park in the Johnny’s Foodmaster lot and just walk over to the pizza parlor. It was also handy because my bank had an ATM booth at the far end of the lot, and I could get some weekend cash there without having to make another stop.

On this particular occasion, I stepped inside the booth and the person ahead of me in line was a woman around my age (though it was a tough call) dressed to the nines in one of those over-the-top short, frilly dresses that were de rigueur for Route 1 dance clubs or the Class of 1986’s senior prom. Her bottle-copper hair was piled high and permed within an inch of its life, and her dark eye shadow ran in teary rivulets down her cheeks. In one shaky hand she held a cigarette and in the other a stack of credit cards, which she fed one at a time into the machine. Each rejected bid for a cash advance was met with a muffled sob and another deep drag.

As thick as the air was with tobacco smoke, the stink of wild desperation was thicker still. Witnessing the scene gave me repeated synaesthetic flashes of a gallows lever being pulled, the platform dropping, and the terminal snap of the vertebrae. To have dug a hole for one’s self that deep, where 9/10ths of the surface area of one’s personal Wheel of Potential Futures is filled with results like “overdose” or “murdered body found in an East Boston dumpster”…it boggles and depresses me immensely. Maybe I should stop by Keno Mart to cheer myself up.

Here’s the song that inspired today’s post, along with a similarly-themed slice of NYC “mutant disco” to round things out:

The Holograms – Scene Whore (from Night of 1000 Ex-Boyfriends, 2005)

Cristina – What’s a Girl to Do? (from Sleep It Off, 1984)