you treat me like a dog

(from The Witching Hour #49; December 1974)
Duke, the Action Dog!

When some woefully unprepared suburban adventures try to scale the slopes of Mt. Avalanche in mid-January....Duke is there!

When Mommy is sleeping off a hangover doesn't notice little Timmy's excursion into the abandoned Black Lung Mine...Duke is there!

When the enemies of Freedom^TM need a little impromptu menace to the genitalia to keep them in line...Duke is there! (Though he will deny any knowledge of it at the court martial proceedings.)

When your fancy dinner party is regrettably free of submissive urination incidents...Duke is there!

Duke's life may seem like a charmed one to many of you, what with the action, adventure, cool gadgets, and all. He even had his own secret headquarters (sold separately) kitted out with a periscope and the finest computer technology the punchcard and tape drive era had to offer.

While that's certainly a step up from usual makeshift lair under far end of the dining room table (strewed with cat food cans and fast food wrappers stolen from the trash, of course), all the fancy gear and accessories were merely futile attempts to fill the gaping void in Duke's inner being.

Duke wants YOU to be his MASTER...because without your firm guiding hand, Duke's life would be just an endless sea of emptiness and self-doubt, devoid of any meaning or purpose. He's a typical canine in that regard.

Dark ruminations about forgotten playthings aside, I wonder if it isn't time to revisit the "heroic pup as toy franchise" model, only with a 21th Century spin. My proposal has been prepared and is currently awaiting approval from the relevant powers that be...

The advances in electronics and toy design over the past three and a half decades mean that the Oscar the Pughuahua toy will include a voice activation feature, where certain key words and phrases will cause him shake off his inertial topor and prance around the house on little chicken legs. In case you were curious, those phrases will be "out," "mashed potato," "beef jerky," "go to bed?" and "donut." And, yes, there will be a variety of accessories (sold separately, of course).

Dr. Alimantado - Tribute to the Duke (from Best Dressed Chicken in Town, 1978) - When he wasn't zipping over chasms or hauling around his Rescue Rickshaw^TM, the Action Dog spent his downtime napping in front of the space heater in his secret HQ and dreaming to the sweet sounds of well-crafted reggae.

Depeche Mode - Master and Servant (from Some Great Reward, 1984) - Love in the Age of Thatcher.

parade of sub-stellar objects

Oh, how I miss those comics anthology series of yesteryear.

When I first started collecting comics, many moons ago, no trip to the flea market quarter bins (which is where the bulk of my childhood collection came from) was complete without an issue or three of Marvel Premiere, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Presents, or any of the reprint-heavy "100 Page Giant" books DC put out in the early 1970's. This was before peer and industry pressure imprinted themselves on my tastes, and the criteria for selecting which comics to buy was based entirely on my own childhood whims. Thus my formative comics-reading years featured a parade of of d-list (or lower) characters...and as the twig is bent, the tree is inclined.

That the stories were utter crap for the most part didn't matter as much as the gnostic aspect of being the kid who eschewed Superman (boring) or Batman (tired) in favor of an optimistically-branded "sensational new character find of 197x" or a back-bencher given some solo face time. There's something magical about that mix of youthful enthusiasm and gullibility, where you're eight years old and totally jazzed about owning the first appearance of 3-D Man or The Torpedo. While there's always a chance that such affections can calcify into an unfortunate state of fan-entitlement and delusions of "ownership," that sincere fascination with the excitingly stupid and absurd is fandom's unpolluted state of grace.

It's not about collectability, speculation, or gratifying the yearnings for vicarious bad-assery -- it's about enjoying entertaining nonsense for its own glorious sake.

Comics publishing has changed since then, and despite calls from the usual armchair quarterbacks, the anthology format is a non-starter in the current evironment. Readership has contracted across the board, and publishers have retreated to the security of proven franchises. The days when straight-ticket Marvel or DC buyers could float a solo appearance by Woodgod or Monark Starstalker are unquestionably over...if it was even feasible to begin with. I didn't realize it back then, but the quarter bins I dug through in the early 1980's were filled with the previous decade's unsold stock.

The growing shift toward trades as long-term revenue generators has effective killed the incentive to publish one-off slush pile stories featuring obscure characters. If a franchise is deemed strong enough to merit publication, prevailing wisdom demands going with either a prestige format one-shot or a limited or ongoing series better suited for publishing in collected format.

While it saddens me that scattershot risk-taking wide-tapestry approach of thirty years ago has gone the way of the dodo, it is difficult enough these days to sustain sales on proven properties. Quality titles outside the major franchise boundaries (Manhunter, Blue Beetle, etc.) are lucky if they clear the two-year hurdle before their cancellation is inevitably announced.

Sure the next generation of pre-adolescent quarter bin divers won't have the joy of discovering the 21st Century's answer to Woodgod, but then again, what kid reads superhero comics these days?

The Innsmen - Things Are Different Now (from a 1967 single; collected on Green Crystal Ties Vol. 8, 1998) - Here's another fine piece of midwestern garage rock, this time from a Michigan outfit unafraid of letting the bassline call the plays.

Halloween Countdown: October 29 - think about it

Back in my junior high days, my friend Brian and I would hike up the Middlesex Canal path to the (now defunct) Northeast Trade Center whenever Jolly Jim's Flea Market rolled into town. A three dollar admission fee (if a friend wasn't working the gate that day) would grant one access to a hundred or so stalls filled to the brim with overpriced crap...and the one dude in the far corner who sold comic books.

Brian was an early adopter of the comic collector ethos that stresses bags, backing boards, and buying multiple copies of a book for investment purposes. For him, these trips were joyless exercises in speculative accounting where he'd blow ten bucks on two "hot" comics that he'd never actually read.

For me, though, it was all about the quarter bins, which in those days were packed near to bursting with overstock from the previous decade (i.e. the 1970s). Three dollars would net the ambitious longbox digger a dozen issues of disposable entertainment -- reprints of Silver Age DC sci-fi stories, random issues of Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-in-One, and books involving obscure bits of trivia gleaned from my (then) incomplete run of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

None of the comics I purchased could even remotely be classified as "money" books -- though that hasn't stopped some of the sleazier comics stores from slapping a ten dollar price tag on the Monark Starstalker issue of Marvel Premiere and seeing if some fool will take the bait -- but I didn't get into the hobby to see a return on my investment. I got into it because it was dumb escapist fun.

That's how I ended up with a complete run of the "It! The Living Colossus" stories from Astonishing Tales. They aren't especially good or groundbreaking or intellectually stimulating, but they entertained me.

It! (the exclamation point signifies a clicking sound, as per the language of the African bushmen, I assume) originally debuted as "The Colossus" in Tales of Suspense #14 (February 1961), back in the days when Marvel's bread and butter were improbably named monsters bent on terrorizing the world. The Colossus was an example of the socialist Realism aesthetic gone horribly wrong -- a hundred foot tall stone statue commissioned (under threat of death) to celebrate the power of the proletariat.

Unfortunately, the Marxist concept of historical inevitability did not take into account the possibility that a crab-like alien creature would appear, merge with the monument, and go on a rampage behind the Iron Curtain...

...which offered Jack Kirby the opportunity to re-imagine The Amazing Colossal Man as Cold War agitprop. Damn cool, indeed.

Though the story ended with the promise of a new age of global peace and understanding, The Colossus returned in Tales of Suspense #20 (August 1961), in which the Soviets decide to ship the now-inert statue to Hollywood as a "gesture of peace." The alien crabmen, having backslid from their previous state of enlightenment into a warlike state, once again seized control of the Colossus, resulting in another stone cold rampage. The American military fared no better than its Warsaw Pact counterparts in stopping the carnage, and even the mighty beatniks were helpless in the face of the stone titan's wrath.

It was left to Bob O'Bryan to save the day, and the unappreciated set designer concocted a plan to lure the aliens out of the Colossus and into a bigger, meaner looking statue loaded with high explosives and a remote detonator. O'Byran's quick thinking earned him the renown long denied him as well as the affections of starlet Diane Cummings.

The Colossus, now sporting the "It!" moniker, returned in the pages of Astonishing Tales #21 (December 1973) as one of Marvel's many attempts to dress up superhero material in monstrous clothing. Bob O'Byran, having been upgraded to a crack special effects man during the interim, decides to put the Colossus to use as the star of a sci-fi blockbuster. His work is interrupted, however, when a ham actor rival for Diane's affections causes an accident that leaves O'Bryan confined to a wheelchair and trapped in a perpetually surly mood.

Bob's rants about the cruelty of fate are interrupted by a bunch of goons seeking to abscond with the Colossus, and in his impotent rage discovers he has the power to telepathically control the statue. He also discovers that animated stone constructs are vulnerable to nerve gas -- despite having neither lungs nor nerves -- and the Colossus is hauled off to the lair of Dr. Vault, a mad scientist of the most generic variety.

Vault has a hankering for a strong, new body and thinks that a bald, granite statue with no genitalia would be perfect for his purposes. He is not as keen about the size, though, and uses his mad science prowess to shrink the Colossus to a more strip club-friendly eight feet tall. The process is interrupted around the thirty-foot benchmark by O'Bryan, who reasserts control and smashes up Vault's hidden lair. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Bob spent the next three issues fighting various scale-appropriate fellow monsters from Marvel's pre-superhero days in between indulging in bouts of typical four-color melodramatic angst.

Viewed with a grown up's eye, the stories are pretty bland and predicable, with the beats rigidly mapped to the overused device of O'Bryan losing his connection with the Colossus at dramatically convenient moments. They also suffer from an over reliance on passing reprinted Silver Age material as in-story flashback sequences and Dick Ayers, an artist whose work I tend to like, trying too hard to mimic Jack Kirby's early 1960's style....which was nifty in 1961, but baffling and distracting in 1973.

Yet for all that, I still retain a good deal of affection for the run, because there's a point where you just have to put aside the quibbles and take the concept of a thirty-foot telepathic flying (Did I mention the Colossus can fly? It! can, and why shouldn't It! be able to?) statue that fights Giant Space Gargoyles on top of the Capitol Records building and fights Giant Chinese Kung-Fu Fighting Dragons for the absurd thing of flawed beauty it is.

That would be Fing Fang Foom, Jack Kirby's re-imagining of Godzilla as Cold War agitprop!
It! The Living Colossus's Astonishing Tales run ended on a inconclusive note with issue #24, but the dangling plot threads were resolved a half-decade later in The Incredible Hulk #244 (February 1980). Bob O'Bryan -- successful, married to Diane, and walking again -- comes out of semi-retirement to protect the City of Angels from the fury of the Jade Giant, only to have his control of the Colossus wrested away by the fiendish Dr. Vault.

Having finally gained the perfect body he'd waited so long for, Vault falls prey to excessive euphoria and tries to go toe to toe with the Hulk. It goes about as well as you'd think...

O'Bryan takes the destruction of the Colossus in stride, as he'd already moved on past the animated statue follies of youth into more adult pursuits. Comics being comics, though, both Bob and the Colossus have made the occasional appearances since then, as there is no character so obscure or resolution so final that someone won't resurrect It! out of irony...or even worse, totally sincere reverence.

Alien Sex Fiend - Get Into It (from It: The Album, 1986) - I was really into it for a year or two, then I fell out of it, forgot about it for a while, then rediscovered it.

lost all track of time

A couple of Fridays back, the wife and I had to make a trip to scenic North Reading on feral cat business. As we were already in Burlington on another errand, I decided to bypass the forbidden zone that is the I-93/I-95 interchange and take the back way, which involved heading down Cambridge Road (not "Street") towards the Billerica line then turning onto Route 62's serpentine path to glory.

It had been a while since I'd been down that way, and I was astonished to find that so little had changed in the past twenty years. The development boom of the past decade or so has completely transformed huge swathes of greater Boston's landscape. Communities that were considered positively honky-tonk when I was a kid, places like Billerica, Wilmington, and Tewksbury, have since become upmarket suburbs, and there is no open space so rocky, swampy, or otherwise tagged with liabilities that some ambitious developer won't clear-cut and terraform it into McMansion-friendly subdivisions. The local "boonies," as much I knew them from childhood, have all but evaporated into a single homogeneous sprawl radiating out from Boston to the edges of I-495 loop.

But not along Route 62, apparently, where old houses are encircled by forests of old trees, and even the post-WW2 ranch homes have gradually assimilated into the backdrop of the green. The corridor hasn't been entirely immune to the sprawl's encroachment, but compared to my old neighborhood in North Woburn, it has remained largely intact...a place where you still need to use your high-beams to navigate in the dark hours.

TWO WARPS TO URANUS!
(Granted, that also applies to the very developed and upscale town of Winchester, but that's because those rich motherfuckers are too cheap to turn up the brightness on their streetlamps. They're also too cheap to pay for trash pickup, which means you see assholes in Porsches illegally dumping their garbage in the Middlesex Fells Reservation.)

We passed by truck and equipment yards with unpaved surfaces bounded by pine trees, anachronistic retail islands at long-bypassed intersections, a poultry farm, and the requisite series of non-chain, locally-owned eateries with inexplicable names. (We also stumbled across the location of the local Wal-Mart store, suggesting that the honky-tonk aura is not so easily dispelled.) It's an odd thing to wax nostalgic over, but it's comforting nonetheless to know that the topography of my childhood exists in some form or another less than twenty minutes from my house. Until the next frenzied round of development begins, that is.

The sharpest jab of nostalgia hit me while were crossing over the Boston-Lowell train tracks by the intersection of Routes 62 and 38 in Wilmington. There, to the left of the road and beside the tracks was this place of many childhood pilgrimages...

Our Mecca, Lourdes, and Graceland rolled into a single seedy piece of commercial real estate.
I couldn't see what occupies the space now, but back in 1984 it was the location of "Trains & Games," the only arcade within reasonable distance of my North Woburn stomping grounds. I don't know which one of the neighborhood crew discovered the place, but once we knew about it, we hopped onto our off-brand BMX bikes and made the long trip to Wilmington whenever time, weather, and availability of quarters permitted.

The selection of games at the place was an adequate enough mix of perennial favorites (Pac-Man, Robotron: 2084, Dig Dug) and a handful of newer titles like Gyruss, Punch Out, and Mr. Do's Wild Ride. The arcade attached to the go-kart further up Route 38 in Tewksbury had a bigger and better selection, but it also involved biking an additional four miles each way. What Trains & Games lacked in diversity, it more than made up for in convenience. Plus the lone staffer behind the booth was far more laid back than the uptight eagle-eyed crew at the Speedway who'd show you to the door the moment your last token was spent.

Mr. Do's Franchise Fatigue!
Weekday afternoons were the ideal time to make the run, as the place tended to be packed on the weekends. The fact that most of the gang had strict dinnertime curfews made it tricky to pull off without split-second timing and frenzied pedaling.

Hit the ground running when the 2:45 final bell at the Linscott-Rumford rang. Throw your book bag in the porch and holler to the parents that you were going out. Meet up with the rest of the crew and zip down the old train tracks to the Wilmington line. Pedal your ass off down Route 38 for a half hour. Burn through a pocket of quarters in twenty minutes. Pedal back to North Woburn while ignoring the stitch in your side. Collapse on the lawn with five minutes to spare.

...and even if you could barely choke down your mac 'n' cheese through the dry heaves and heat exhaustion, those brief minutes of pixelized joy were totally worth it.

"You know what this game needs? A boss with a rape conviction and a penchant for ear biting!"
In the autumn of 1984, my family moved out of North Woburn to the center of the city. The additional four miles of biking required and the discovery that the local pool hall and bowling alley had game rooms (and were in walking distance) put a stop to my trips to Trains & Games, though I occasionally tagged along with a friend whose mom used to drop him off there. The last time I visited the place, sometime during my sophomore year in college, the arcade had gone under and had been replaced by one of the many lousy comic book stores that attempted to make hay during the 1990's speculation boom. It, too, went tits up a short while later.

Seeing the place after all these years brought back a flood of vivid memories -- nothing especially dramatic or important, just very distinct impressions of a time long past. I can see the shortcut to East Dexter Avenue in bright light of a spring afternoon. I can smell the muddy tang of the shallow stream that ran alongside the path. I can hear Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherrie" and Phil Collins's "Against All Odds" -- and I wish to Christ it would just stop.

I place a lion's share of the blame on Hot Hit Videos, an attempt by the local CBS affiliate to cash in on the music video craze of the time. The show's 4:30 PM time slot made it ideal cooldown time viewing after getting back from the arcade, but the programmers' fondness for AOR cheese has left me scarred for life.

If I have to remember the spring of 1984 through pop music, at least let it be pop music I actually enjoyed at the time...like these two tracks...

The Go-Go's - Head Over Heels (from Talk Show, 1984) - Goodbye, bubbly new wave....

Ratt - Round and Round (from Out of the Cellar, 1984) - ...and hello, ugly pop metal.

hip to be square

In response to yesterday's post, reader Dave L. of Springfield asked "Prexies?"

The etymology of the word is presumably tied to "prexy," a bygone slang term for a college president which ended up being applied to the high priesthood of Pat Boone fandom. The notion that "Mr. Nice" had a large, organized fan following may strike some of you as a really quaint and bizarre phenomenon, but keep in mind that a lot of what we think of the "Fifties" is a artificial construction of post facto nostalgia.

We tend to conflate eras with their associated "hip" fads and subcultures (greasers, hippies, punks, et cetera), creating a skewed image which fails to reflect the historical reality. My father graduated from high school in 1968 and my mother in 1969. A quick flip through either of their yearbooks fails to turn up a single example of freak or flower child, just page after page of neatly groomed lads and lassies at odds with the psychedelic popcult perception of the late 1960's.

Such things did exist, to be sure, but as fringe elements whose disproportionate cultural influence and mediagenic power color our collective historical mythology. It's reductive (as all shorthand is by definition) and it plays toward expected flavor rather than nuance...especially when the nuanced version is perceived to be tres unhip. There are far more people willing to boast about how they bought the original 12" pressing of "Blue Monday" back in the day than there are folks who'll cop to buying Toto IV, despite what the sales figures state. I'd much rather wallow in the warts'n'all version of the past than the rose-tinted and romanticized facsimile passed off as the genuine article.

Besides, who am I to lob stones at late 1950's Pat Boone fans and their byzantine organization? At least there was a manic sense of sincerity in their devotion, which feels quite refreshing in an age when the Hannah Montana and Camp Rock blocks are waging a relentless war for merchandised supremacy in the aisles of every superstore in the country. (The battle will not end until the last tube of hemorrhoid salve has been brought into licensed compliance.)

While the subject of Pat Boone fandom seems ideally suited for the Lilekian "Ha ha! Look how stupid these people were back then" school of mockery, I find it difficult to lob haughty cheap shots at targets that range from quite sad...


...to downright tragic...


See what I mean? Cruel mockery becomes redundant when dealing with those who get squishy whenever they hear "Love Letters in the Sand" or who celebrate their devotion to blandly innocuous pop music through verse...


Okay, that's just fucking creepy.

Ill Repute - Clean Cut American Kid (from Rodney on the ROQ, Vol. 3, 1982) - How about a little Nardcore, prexies?

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Little Demon (from Cow Fingers & Mosquito Pie, 1991) - I find this b-side to 1956's "I Put a Spell on You" serves as a nice vaccine against the ravages of pure strain Boonitis.

I am my ideal

I had a drama professor back in college who was a bit of a rogue, but an outstanding instructor nonetheless. For some reason presumably tied to departmental politics, he was the person who usually got tasked with teaching the foundation courses in Traditions of Western Drama or whatever the prevailing uni-speak is for "reading a shitload of old plays and discussing why they matter."

These were the mandatory courses that every aspiring thespian or playwright had to suffer through before passing onward and upward to the sexier, hands-on parts of the curriculum, but this professor had a knack for making us care about the plays discussed in class. More importantly, instead of conducting the class as a watered-down English Lit course, he approached the material with an accent on technical aspects over critical theory. (Which is how it ought to be for a theater arts class, but in my experience often not the case.)

"Significance" meant less to him than entertainment value, and when the time came to discuss the dreary naturalism of Strindberg, Ibsen, and the like, he came right out and stated "These are historically important plays. They are important works of literature. You should all be familiar with them. That said, I would rather sit through a community theatre Starlight Express than suffer through a Broadway production of Enemy of the People with an all-star cast."

Hardly a divine revelation, but it's one of those moments that has stuck with me over the years even as other, arguably more important parts of my college education have slipped from conscious memory. The idea that a tenured professor of literature with an impressive resume could step outside the ivory tower and make case for entertainment value in and of itself made me realize that I wasn't just gaming the system and wasting my time at college, humoring the unfortunately high number of insular or clueless instructors that viewed appreciation as a gnostic process, removed from the vulgarity of the masses. (Seriously. I had one professor who was shocked, shocked, to discover that fans of romance novels were not a monolithic block of uneducated bon-bon munchers.)

Or I should have taken it as a clear warning that my lateral thinking processes and poor sense of self-discipline were fundamentally at odds with formal academia. Honestly, if I had to do it all over again, I'd have gone to trade school to be an auto mechanic and kept with the autodidactic route when it came to the the study of humanities.

In any case, the complicated relationship between entertainment and art is something I've addressed quite a few times already on Armagideon Time, usually in reference to the medium of comics or music. Despite recurring assertions to the contrary, quality is a relative concept when it comes to something a personal as "art," and while it is possible to establish a hierarchy of aesthetic value on a macro level, the boundaries tend to blur with closer examination. As always, keeping a sense of perspective is the best course of action, and that's something which is most easily achieved by observing the widest possible vista instead of limiting one's experiences to a single strata, be it lofty peaks of "high art" or the vulgar sumps of disposable entertainment.

Which brings us to AIP's series of Beach Party movies, director William (the real-life Mr. Samantha the Witch) Asher's sybaritic counterpart to Roger Corman's stygian Poe cycle of technicolor exploitation fare -- the Eros and Thanatos of early 1960's drive-in theaters.

Pal Dorian has dedicated this week to the antics of Frankie, Dee Dee and the gang, and his analysis of the series hits pretty much covers all the salient points I could possibly make about their enduring appeal.

The jokes are pure corn, the surfing scenes are almost avant-garde in their rear-projected fakery, the original musical numbers are embarrassingly dire, and the hokey bacchanalia of the privileged white "teenage" characters occurs in a world completely isolated from what was going down in America's inner cities or over in Southeast Asia at the time.

As terrible and cheapjack as the Beach Party films are, though, I can't help enjoying them nonetheless, and no summer vacation would be complete without a Sunday afternoon viewing of at least one the movies. (This year it was Muscle Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo.) Chalk it up to nostalgia -- nostalgia for a childhood when the films were staples of weekend afternoon UHF programming, for the lame-but-quaint tropes of vintage sitcom-style humor, and most importantly for the reassuring presence of various guest-stars drawn from the stable of character actors (Paul Lynde, Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, et cetera) familiar to every heavy TV-viewing kid of my generation.

I wouldn't make a case that the films occupy a loftier cinematic position than, say, The Godfather, but I do know what I'd rather sit down to watch on a lazy summer weekend. Coppola's epic may masterfully dissect the nature of the American capitalism, but it does it feature lip-synched performances of either of these musical gems?

Stevie Wonder - Happy Street (from The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 4, 2006) - A swingin' soul celebration, as featured in Muscle Beach Party (1964).

The Kingsmen - Give Her Lovin' (from The Kingsmen, Vol. 2, 1964) - Ginchy garage rock, as featured in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).

hungry so angry

Yesterday a friend asked me "Why'd you pick 'Armagideon Time' for your blog's name?" When I decided to create whatever-the-heck-this-site-is back in the spring of 2006, there was a short list of potential names I considered using. All but one, "The Land of Clear Blue Radio" (after The Soviettes' song), were Clash-related, in honor of the high regard in which I hold for the "only band that mattered."

"Capitol Radio One," "Gates of the West," "The Right Profile" were all worthy contenders, but none felt or sounded as perfect as "Armagideon Time." Apart from being the title of an outstanding track (whether one is referring to the Willie Williams or Clash version), it also dovetailed nicely with my own personal infatuation with things apocalyptic and foreboding. It's not a religious thing with me, but a legacy of childhood anxieties that I have carried with me into adulthood.

From the depressing extrapolations of 1970's sci-fi to the nuclear dread of the Reagan Era, my formative years were spend bathing in a popcultural spring of visions of the End Times, presented as an inevitable occurrence though the actual vector of Armageddon (nuclear war, ecological collapse, revolt by intelligent apes) varied from source to source. There is something I find fascinating in apocalyptic flights of fancy -- they way they speak to the collective anxieties of an given era/culture as well as the vicarious thrill of watching the human species choke on its own excessive folly or come up short against uncaring entropy.

If there's a sincere cautionary message, it's usually so overdressed in sensationalism or hyperbole that it devolves into unintentional parody, a trite moral to justify the big draw of the spectacle itself. Or else it merely emphasizes a small-but-dramatic part of the big picture over the little details, the ones with real-life significance.

I recently came away from a trip to the local comics and used book store with a plastic grocery bag full of old paperback sci-fi and horror novels. My haul, which set me back all of twelve dollars, was evenly split between works of relative quality by the likes of Huxley and Spinrad and number of volumes of "catastrophe porn." I use the term "porn" rather loosely (though not inaccurately, as we shall see) to differentiate these dubiously prophetic potboilers from the blanket term of "disaster fiction" coined and thoughfully analyzed by Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear.

Unlike Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the apocalyptic elements in catastrophe porn are not integrated backdrops for an actual narrative, but in fact supercede whatever thin narrative might exist. Characterization and plot serve as skeletal frameworks from which to hang the series of sensational vignettes which are the real selling point of such works. It's not about whether or not Chuck Heston will reconcile with Eva Gardner -- it's about watching L.A. collapse into rubble and anarchy.

Here's a excerpt from the back cover of the 1981 Ace Charter edition of Graham Masterton's Famine, an excellent example of the subgenre which also happeded to be the first of the stack I pulled out to read:


Hilarious, offensive, and informative!

There is something of a plot in Famine. A big city actuary turned Kansas farmer and his Manhattan-loving wife find their existence turned upside down by a multi-pronged assault on America's food supply. While corrupt and/or politicians attempt to exploit or acknowledge the situation, the country falls into a state of complete anarchy. The mystery of who caused the crisis doesn't so much unfold as pop out like a built-in turkey thermometer. (Is it the Soviets? Who could it be but the Soviets? Maybe it isn't the Soviets? But who, if not the Soviets? Yep, it's the Soviets. Oh, well.)

Really, though, it's a lot of wheel-spinning in anticipation of the juicy parts, little lurid nuggets describing all manner of horrors unleashed by the disaster.

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, twenty men and one woman tried to break into a supermarket and steal boxes of canned meat, vegetables, and fruit. They were almost through loading when they were surprised by a National Guard patrol who machine-gunned all of them with warning. Their bodies were littered across the parking lot, and a reporter for the Herald-Bulletin of Tulsa said, "There was so much blood it was gurgling down the storm drains like crimson bathwater."

It's a veritable pagent of graphically-described murders, looting, riots, and a disturbing amount of rape, including one scene that surpasses anything from American Psycho for sheer "what the fuck is wrong with this author?" vileness). Ample lashings of sex and ultra-violence are the order of the day, resulting in something akin to a non-racist* version of Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries, apolitical save for the pithy observation that the American people overconsume, are overentitled, and are prone to violence.

Gee, I never noticed.

Masterton writes in a style reminiscent of James Herbert's, which is essentially a stripped down version of Stephen King's style with the sensationalism cranked to the highest setting. It certainly fits the level of the material, though lines such as this one...

"You've been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I've been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day."

...and not recall the painful days of one's freshman creative writing class.

Famine is utter crap, but utter crap that greasily fulfills its purpose as a disposable, sleazy read which capitalizes on the fears of privation felt by a society that had recently experienced several shortages of essential goods. Yeah, I know, it seems so quaint and silly from a present-day perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take out a second mortgage so I can gas up the car and buy a loaf of bread.

Willie Williams - Armagideon Time (from Armagideon Time, 1979) - Back to the roots.

Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor - Theme from Green Acres (from Television's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, 1990) - Ever want to see an episode of Green Acres where Oliver was seduced by a busty double agent working to cultivate a corrupt senator as the puppet leader of a future Soviet-occupied and famine-ravaged America? If so, then I have book suggestion for you.

*The book does mention that black looters were more violent than white ones in the initial wave of food riots, but by the end everyone has sunk to the same level of lawless behavior, though white L.A. residents are singled out as being especially monstrous. It's not hard to deduce the book's target audience.

when you put it that way

Scholastic's Dynamite used to run a regular feature titled "Super-Heroes Confidential," much adored by my younger self yet completely forgotten about until I flipped through the recently purchased stack of mid-1970's issues of the defunct kiddie magazine.

It was a pretty nifty (and corporately ecumenical) method of genre evangelism from a time when kids were still the primary target audience for superhero comics. Each installment spotlighted a specific superhero -- mostly Marvel and DC characters, though I vaguely remember some representatives of the King Features comic strip stable getting face time -- with a smartly recolored reprint of the character's origin story followed with a single page FAQ covering other details and semi-pertinent information.

In a time before The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe or Who's Who in the DCU and the ready availability of comprehensive reprint collections, it offered the tykes a handy little infodump (and an opportunity to read otherwise unavailable material) to kindle the flames of nacent fandom...even if for only a short while.

The FAQ sections are especially priceless, as they attempted to distill months and years of often slapdash sequential storytelling into a couple of sentences of kid-friendly plain text. It may have escaped my notice at the time, but these nuggets of continuity-laden (and now, thanks to the endless circular grind of the medium, mostly out-of-date) trivia highlight the stupidity and absurdity of the genre in a manner that surpasses works such as Watchmen or Marshal Law.

For instance, check out this explanation of Captain America's romantic take on "family values," from a 1974 issue of Dynamite:

Naturally!
Jeepers, Cap, she's only (Agent) 13!

Roger McGuinn - American Girl (from Thunderbyrd, 1977) - I have nothing but the utmost respect for Roger McGuinn, both for his role in The Byrds and his subsequent solo career, but this baffling take on a Tom Petty classic is just wrong.....though not nearly as wrong as fucking the sexy younger sister of your middle-aged former flame.

Dead or Alive - Brand New Lover (from Rip It Up, 1987) - Don't look at me like that. Claim as much indie/punk rock cred as you want; we all have dance pop skeletons in our musical closets.

got your name, got your number

Like, those graphics are totally trippindicular!
It's 1983, and the home videogame industry is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. The mad rush to cash in on the videogame craze has led to a market saturated beyond sustainability with substandard product. The bargain bins of Heartland Drug (oh, how I miss that place) are groaning under the weight of hundreds of unsold cartridges priced at a deep discount.

So how did C.B.S. Electronics choose to differentiate Solar Fox, its adequate port of an unremarkable 1981 coin-op title, from the rest of the hastily programmed contenders for the weary consumer's dollar?

By attempting to ride the coattails of an ephemeral popcult phenomenon engendered by a hit novelty song by Frank (and Moon) Zappa, of course...


Solar Fox: The TV Commercial
Solar Fox: The Comic Book Version
(clicking makes it even more bitchin', like totally)
Is the comic book ad an expanded "director's cut" of the television commercial? Or is it akin to one of those novelizations where the professional fan-ficcer author takes liberties with the source material? ("Chewie put a soft paw on Han's shoulder and gazed longingly into his roguish eyes...")

Unfortunately for C.B.S. Electronics, their tantalizing promise of "valley girl in outer space" action was sadly undercut by the utter lack of such within the actual game, and the "excitement" did end abruptly in 1984, when the company, along with most of the other cartridge mills, fell victim to the market implosion they helped bring about.

I was fairly oblivious to the great videogame crash of 1983-84 while it was unfolding, except as a beneficiary to the flood of Atari 2600 games marked down within purchasing reach of an eleven year old with a $10 weekly allowance. At $4.99 a pop, it was easy to build up a substantial library of cartridges. Even if most of the games were utter shit, one of the benefits of being a kid is that one's critical faculties tend to be rather lacking, which meant that even something like Space Jockey (hastily slapped together by the gaming wizards at Quaker Oats) could hold my attention for hours.

(Most of us grow out of such bottomfeeding habits as we get older. The ones that don't tend to be found in places like the scans_daily Livejournal community or the Newsarama forums.)

Occasionally I reget not holding on to my collection of 2600 cartridges, which was scattered to the winds in the great upheval after my mother passed away, but the feeling fades quickly after I revisit some of the more interesting titles via emulation software. Even the most dedicated retrologist is occasionally forced to admit that some things really are better left in the past.

Yeah, given the focus of today's post, I trust you're all probably expecting me to post "Valley Girl" by Frank and Moon Unit Zappa. The truth is that I'm not all that fond of the song, which I find more irritating than anything. Instead we've got the breezy new wave pop theme from 1983 Zappa-free film Valley Girl, which is my wife's default viewing choice when there's nothing else worth watching on cable...

Bonnie Hayes with the Wild Combo - Girls Like Me (from Good Clean Fun, 1982)

...and a sparkling synthpop obscurity...

Circuit 7 - Video Boys (from a 1984 single)

Albums That Meant Something - Part 4 - Dying to Be Written

(from Skeleton Key, Volume 3: Telling Tales, by Andi Watson)
While I never self-identified as a goth back in the embarrassing old days, I did listen to and purchase quite a bit of "goth" music. By the time my twenty-first birthday rolled around, I had already started to evolve past my punk rock persona phase, as the stock set of subcultural trappings felt less like sincere act of rebellion and more like a cul-de-sac of clichés. Musically, too, my tastes had begun to shift from the aggro to the atmospheric -- postpunk, synthpop & wave, anarchopunk stuff mostly.

It was a period when I revisited a lot of previously acquired material that had been filed at the back of my collection when it failed to pass my punk puritan criteria -- a sequence of small epiphanies which collectively added up to a paradigm shift in my listening habits. Even albums I'd liked well enough before, such as Unknown Pleasures and Entertainment, fairly well blindsided me with sublime charm that until then I'd been oblivious to.

So it was with UK Decay. My love of "For My Country," the Luton band's epic and artsy contribution to the Punk and Disorderly compilation, led me to pick up a copy of the "Unexpected Guest" single, whose spookshow subject matter, operatic vocals, and dub-influenced basslines was utterly lost on my ignorant Cock Sparrer-listening self. I passed the single onto a friend, only to ask for it back a couple years later after I'd smartened up...and this time around it sounded like the greatest thing I'd ever heard.

A short while later, Maura and I were flipping through the bins at the Tower Records store in Harvard Square. While the store's prices ran on the high side compared to other shops (which I suspect is the real reason -- not p2p applications -- that the chain eventually went belly up), it did have an section dedicated to indie and import releases. The usual ritual for the import CD stock involved being marked up to extortionate prices for a few months before inevitably being dumped unsold in a discount bin at the end of the aisle...which is where I found the subject of today's post.

It's the original 1992 release of the companion compilation disc to Mick Mercer's Gothic Rock encyclopedia. It was purchased for a fiver on the basis of having an otherwise unobtainable (for me, at least) UK Decay track culled from the band's amazing Rising From the Dread EP, but it also introduced me to (or washed away the taint of negative personal associations from) a half-dozen or so other acts that would loom large in my listening and purchasing habits into the present day; bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, and Danse Society that, unlike the guitar rock sound that the gothic rock genre eventually coalesced into, took their cues from punk/postpunk and and ran in a host of strange, dark and quite often playful directions.

Much like Mercer's book (purchased after it got an American release), the Gothic Rock compilation does an excellent job at fostering an appreciation for the scene, music, and participants that doesn't attempt to gloss over the silly and/or pretentious aspects therein. The compilation was eventually given an American release, padded with extra tracks and eventually expanded into a multi-volume set, but I've never felt the need to upgrade from the original. That's partially due to sentimental reasons, but also because I've gotten past the place where I need such roadmaps.

UK Decay - Testament - By all rights, it should topple over the precipice into pretentious self-parody, yet it somehow manages to retain a precarious balance that gives gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it.

Sex Gang Children - Dieche - Fuck you, AFI, and the My Chemical Romance you rode in on, too.

do you remember rock and roll video

The object of the I "Heart" is Robert Smith. Maura wanted to keep her old headboard, so she has to keep the shame as well.
V-66, "The Beat of Boston," was the short-lived, but sorely missed local music video station that was the only thing that made 8th grade tolerable for this poorly socialized example of nerdy adolesecent angst...

A time machine and a dope slap, that's all I'm asking for.
It lasted for little more than a year before selling out to the Home Shopping Network in late 1986, but it was a blast while it lasted. Its playlist was ecumenical, if a bit too skewed at times to the AOR end of the spectrum (though the magic of music video could make the most commercial drek palatable by adding a visual narrative or sci-fi art direction), yet it remained fiercely parochial (sometimes embarassingly so), spotlighting music by a host of local acts of the day.

Some, like the Del Fuegos and Til Tuesday, mananged to register on the national scene. Others, like Ball and Pivot, November Group, and the Dogmatics, never broke free of the Boston-Providence axis. V-66 had a tremendous impact on the youth of this region. Mere mention of it can inspire near-fatal bouts of nostalgia in those who were enraptured by its low-budget UHF spell, yet much (but not all) of the recorded evidence has been lost to the ages. (The same goes for the "I'm Robillard and I'm from Mars" PSA that used to run early weekend mornings on WCVB.)

The music can still be found with a bit of digging (and it would be nice if CDBaby would get around to reissuing the Lizzie Borden & The Axes compilation), and this promises to be a fucking hoot:



Ordinarily, I'd be the last person on earth to defend the use of that particular Starship song, but a Bostonized version of the track did figure heavily into the station's promotional efforts. Hey, it was the mid-1980's, what can I say?

Speaking of awkward memories, there is one track and video that represents the V-66 era above all others. It's the one that inevitably gets mentioned whenever the subject of V-66 is brought up. While I cannot produce the video, which was shot on Newbury Street (and featured a feminist-positive image of woman as the devil), I did recently manage to locate a copy of the LP featuring the song, a dangerously infectious bit of Latin-inflected new wave pop that has been indelibly burned into the brains of a generation of Bay Staters.

New Man - Bad Boys (from New Man, 1986) - Like getting sacpunched by the zeitgeist of twenty-two years ago....

(This post is dedicated to thirdmate and Jack. They know damn well why.)

no ice in your lovers walk

This is supposed to by the final day of the heat wave that has engulfed the northeast in its suffocating blanket of haze and humidity, but part of being a Bay Stater born and bred is learning to take what the meteorologists say with a fifty-pound bag of salt. New England weather admits no master, and takes a preternatural joy in confounding expectations. I won't believe we've managed to wiggle out of the Devil's Armpit until I actually see the barometer drop and the feel the cool breeze on my face.

Whenever the temperatures begin to spike 'round these parts, I find myself thinking back to the scorching summer of 1993, back when I used to work the Saturday shift at the college library. Apart from the intrinsic lousiness of having to get up early on a Saturday, it was excellent work -- a 9-to-5 shift in an air conditioned building at a commuter school during intersession.

I worked the circulation desk and the number of patrons I had to deal with during a given shift could be counted on the fingers of both my hands and two of the toes on my right foot, and all phone inquiries answered with one of three standardized responses:

1. No, this isn't the Boston Public Library.
2. No, this isn't Boston University.
3. No, this isn't Puritan Pizza.

The rest of my my time was spent doing some light shelving, surprising the occasional mastubator during a floor sweep, and reading stacks of books and periodicals on whatever subject currently had my fancy. I'm not exaggerating when I state that the bulk of what I learned in college came from my at-work reading. The amount of time I had to kill, combined with a half-dozen floors packed with available reading material, allowed me range far and wide subject-wise with minimal distractions.

History (cultural, social, military), sociology, film studies, art, literature of all stripes, biology, astronomy -- all there for the studying, with no pesky tests or essays to harsh the learning buzz. Plus, sitting under a tree and reading The Stranger and The Plague during a lunch break in triple-digit temperatures really adds to Camus's Algerian je ne sais quoi in a way that can't be imitated in a classroom environment.

(I'm not knocking formal pedagogical methods, as there are certain things, like critical thinking methods, that benefit from the insight and guidance of a skilled second party. The problem is that too many of my college classes were more about gaming the instructor's system than about the actual transfer of knowledge.)

Some of the books I spent the most time with were grabbed from the reference section, which was blessed with an oversized encyclopedia of international horror films, an annotated bibliography on nuclear war fiction, bound volumes of film reviews from 1981-83, and (astoundingly) a copy of the Who's New Wave in Music directory. Taken together, they form an excellent snapshot of my predominant interests circa 1993.

After my shift ended, I'd walk to the bus platform in the late afternoon sun and catch the shuttle to the JFK/UMass Red Line station. From there, I'd take a northbound train to (the pre-gentrified) Central Square, and hike up Mass Ave to Harvard Square on foot, stopping at the various used record stores along the way.

Though I had fallen away from buying vinyl at that point (thanks to Maura's birthday present of a CD player and the emerging flood of CD-only imports and reissues), old habits die hard. There were still plenty of deals to be had on albums that either had missed the reissue bandwagon or weren't worth spending fifteen bucks for the CD version (as opposed to two bucks for a used LP).

My musical tastes were also in flux, gravitating away from punk/hardcore/industrial exclusivity and towards the pop, wave, and postpunk (and by extension, gothic) end of the spectrum. Flipping through my record collection, it's easy to notice the split -- from Sham 69 and company to The Lexicon of Love to Sex Gang Children in a few short steps -- even if I can't remember the specific instances of purchase. (In hindsight, I wish I bought a lot more records than I did.)

When I was done dilly-dallying over yesterday's musical castoffs, I would trek up Mt. Auburn Street to meet Maura at the cafe she waitressed at, where I'd swig discounted Italian sodas and lounge in the Cantabridgian twilight as I waited for her shift to end. From there, another short jaunt on the Red Line and a longer one on the ever-unreliable 96 bus would bring us back to her place, where we'd spend the rest of the evening watching The Kids in the Hall and Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central while her rabbits ran riot around the room.

Good times, indeed.

Here's a mini-sampler taken from the aforementioned albums I purchased and listened to back in those days:

INXS - The One Thing (from Shabooh Shoobah, 1982) - A case of partner-to-partner musical osmosis. She taught me to appreciate INXS, I taught her to appreciate the Abrasive Wheels.

Bauhaus - Dancing (from Mask, 1981) - Spasmodically gyrating around the borderlands of postpunk, pop and perentiousness.

ghosts of a dead future

I remember when the future was orange, set to the tune of blip tones and the whirring of tape reels in sterile, climate-controlled rooms.

It was a time when utopian fantasies took a back seat to dystopian nightmares engendered by the collective anxieties of a society trying to find its footing after a period of immense political and cultural upheaval. The only way to escape, if escape was even a possibility, was to return to the green world's ecological alternative to dehumanizing technological processes.

Yet, for all the lip service paid toward a life lived in harmony with nature and the rejection of the synthetic, it was an era marked by contoured plastic, earth-toned polyester, and Brutalist architecture.

It was an interesting time in which to be a kid, that's for sure...



See what I mean?

Raymond Scott - Baltimore Gas & Electric (from Manhattan Research, Inc. 2000) - From the dawn of ambient electronic music.

Gerhard Trede - Technischer Bewegungsablauf (from Electronic Toys: A Retrospective of 70's Easy Listening, 1996) - That's "technical course of motion," for those of you not fluent in deutsch.

Electric Moog Orchestra - Space Symphony (from Music From Close Encounters, 1977) - Ever summer, Maura makes a point of watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I'd rather watch paint dry.

and wider and brighter

I'm going to take a break from the class war today in order to pay tribute to Armagideon Time HQ's resident feline matriarchs...

...Little Baby Setzer (the gray and white tabby) and Nubby (the tuxedo cat). They started visiting our house in the summer of 2005 as part of a quartet of feral kitten sisters. When we brought the entire group to our vet to be fixed that following spring, we were informed that both Nubby and Setz had already been knocked up and that they were too far along to safely abort.

(Maura and I have since been told that was bullshit by someone from the local feral cat spay and neuter group, but what's done is done.)

We took the pregnant pair of felines into our home, and they gave birth -- two days apart from each other at the end of April 2006 -- to two litters of four kittens each. While she carried out her maternal responsibilities to the letter, Nubby wasn't enthusiastic about motherhood and let the more dedicated Setz pick up most of the slack.

Unlike their non-pregnant sisters (Money and Princess) who couldn't wait to get back outside after the post-spay observation period, Nubby and Setz embraced the housecat life style and never looked back. We ended up keeping four of their kittens (Jem, CooCoo, and Carmen from Nubby's brood and Witch Baby from Setz's), the other four (Tyra, Beezo, Ultima Morpho, and Gizmo) were placed in good homes.

The Cure - The Lovecats (from a 1983 single; collected on Staring at the Sea, 1986) - Staring at the Sea being one track and the Atlantic Ocean removed from Standing on a Beach which I own in LP format. It was the first Cure album I bought (at In Your Ear's Harvard Square location, along with a copy of PIL's Album, in the January of 1992), and I picked it up because I thought the girl I was dating (a very strange woman named Maura) was a big fan of the band.

Even though confused my past and present tenses -- she had been a big fan, but became disgusted with them after The Top -- the purchase was a mini-watershed moment that shook me loose of punk purist attitudes concerning music.

a fool might start a fight

My choice of footwear during my junior high school days:

Oh, how I loved my camouflage Chuck Taylors, Reagan Era militarism made manifest as funky footwear. I owned two pairs, both of which I wore until the canvas uppers rotted and came away from the rubber soles.

Though Chuck Taylors have since become a iconic fashion accessory for the hipster set, back in the mid-1980's they were simply another excuse for social ostracism for the lads and lasses attending the Kennedy Jr. High School. The sneaker wars were just beginning to heat up in those days, and the ever-changing hierarchy of brands acted as a quick-and-easy shorthand by which to separate the elect from the damned...and there was no quicker road to the Abyss than being caught wearing a pair camo high-tops.

Plus they had rubber toes, and rubber toes are for "fags" dont'cha know?

On the apex of the social pyramid, "My Adidas" ruled in the study hall as is in Heaven. I freely confess my lack of enthusiasm for rap and hip hop is rooted in class and race issues. I despised the rich white motherfuckers who were the biggest fans of those genres in my middle school days. It's hard to develop an appreciation for the "sounds of the street" when the son of the bank manager (sporting a designer tracksuit and gold chains) is the genre's resident musical ambassador.

Looking back, my decision to wear, and more importantly stick with, my woodland camo Chucks despite the taunts was an early step on my path to punk rock, in the sense that I started to grasp the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" rules of the game and simply walked away from the table. It's better to be an honest goat than a Sisyphean wannabe sheep.

Converse discontinued making the camouflage version of the shoe by the time my second pair finally gave up the ghost, and I had to settle for the basic black model until my freshman year, when I was given my first pair of combat boots by my father, and I haven't looked back since.

I don't regret the decision, though it did mean missing out on these stylin' fad-licensed kicks...

...ideal for Bat-dancing the night away (though they lack the proper arch support necessary for doing the Batusi without severe risk of injury).

Teen Idles - Sneakers (from the Minor Disturbance EP, 1980) - Not to be confused with the Idle Race, though I occasionally fantasize about Jeff Lynne and Ian MacKaye collaborating on a emo hardcore/symphonic prog concept album. Then I remember this and the resulting screams of terror can be heard as far away as the Pioneer Valley.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Camouflage (from BGM, 1981) - Oddball synth is the new KBD punk.

The Marks - High Heel Sneakers (from a 1966 single; collected on Rare & Raw Beat from the Sixties, Vol. 1, 1996) - Sure, this R&B standard has been covered by everyone and their collective grandmother, but you haven't lived until you've heard it translated into Dutch freakbeat.

installed to cop

Boston really never had much in the way of a homegrown gothic music scene, which is pretty surprising considering the city's historical atmosphere, architecture, and abundance of "spooky" locales. Salem's pagan Mecca is just a short hop up Route 1 from the city proper, and the Halloween season around these parts is absolutely note-perfect, a time when chill October winds make the fallen leaves caper and dance around the crumbling headstones of colonial burial grounds under the glow of a swollen harvest moon.

While the region's inherent spooktacular qualities would seem like a more fertile ground for a local goth scene to take root in than Los Angeles' surf, sun, and subdivisions, it never managed to happen. There was a small handful of bands clustered around the BDSM-themed multimedia hijinks of Sleep Chamber (who as a band, made an okay performance art troupe), but they made little if any impact outside their small circle. It wasn't until the early 90's that Sleep Chamber, in a symbiotic relationship with the goth-friendly (but not goth-exclusive) dance venue Man Ray, evolved into a minor cult sensation, but by that time the band's sound had drifted into then-popular industrial-dance music realm.

That's not to say that Greater Boston didn't have its share of goth devotees in the early-to-mid-1980's, but most of the crowd (the younger ones, especially) tended to exist as a subset of the larger punk milieu. As my wife, who was a punk rocker at the time put it, "the pretty punks became goths." In music, as with fashion, the barriers between the non-hardcore punk and goth sets blurred, with the fans getting their darkly iridescent music fixes from the UK's thriving gothic rock scene. Not surprising considering that, with the exception of LA's roster of "deathrock" acts, very few American bands copped onto the early 80's goth sound, and the few who did tended to be, well, uninspired.

Which brings us to the matter of Holy Cow, who were one of the aforementioned local gothic rock outfits in Sleep Chamber's orbit. Maura caught them live, as the opening act Specimen, back in her teenage years, and despised them, mostly due to the absurd onstage antics of their frontman. (Apparently he had an excessive fondness for leaping around and mugging for the audience, to the point where Maura was worried he was going to reach out and grab her eyeglasses from her face.) As a result, "Holy Cow" became a shorthand reference for a terrible performance, and a mention of the band's name would bring an elicit an reflexive "Oh, Gawd..." from the lovely lass (as it did this morning when I told her what I planned to write about today).

I'm not ashamed to confess that when it comes to the differences in taste between Maura and myself there is a point where I willingly cede matters to my personal imp of the perverse. My appreciation for certain bands or songs is heightened (Bowie's "Drive-In Saturday," Lord Sitar) or in some cases entirely predicated (Shampoo) or anticipating my wife's disgusted reaction when they crop up on the Zune's playlist during a commute home from work.

(I see it as a way to defuse incidental tensions in a non-belligerent manner, thus maintaining our usually harmonious relationship. Maura may see it differently. In fact, when it comes to Shampoo, I know she does.)

And so, when I came across a copy of Call It What You Will, Holy Cow's 1986 debut album, in the "Misc. H" bin at Second Coming Records back in the summer of 1993, I knew I had to buy it. Having only listened to it in the safety of my own personal space, with no risk of harm to my spectacles, I have to say it's really not that bad. It's simply redundant.

From the vocalist's blatant Peter Murphy impersonation to the obligatory dub-derived sonic effects, Call It What You Will makes no attempt to conceal the band's attempt to ape Bauhaus circa 1980. While I think In The Flat Field was and is a fantastic record, I really can't see the point of making a blurry mimeograph of the album half a decade after the fact.

It doesn't help that Holy Cow chose to fully embrace the genre tropes that were still in gestation when Bauhaus recorded their debut album six years prior. Good goth music tends to either walk a fine line between atmosphere and pretense (Bauhaus, UK Decay), or embrace the sillier aspects of the subject matter in a tongue in cheek fashion (Specimen, Alien Sex Fiend). Screw with the balance and there's a high risk of devolving -- no matter how strong the material may otherwise be -- into caricature, unintentional self-parody, or even worse, the po-faced absurdity associated with the death metal scene.

Remember: A little bit of the macabre goes a long way, and there are better way to honor one's heroes than to dress up in their natty old clothes.

From Call It What You Will:

Holy Cow - Ichorous Pus

Holy Cow - Lady Cadava

(For the record, this is the first post in which I made use of my USB turntable. It only took me four months to set it up, which is a new record time for my achieving a stated goal.)

though I love you unclean

From the January-February 1988 issue of Nintendo Power comes this token effort toward music journalism...

(Click to be like Wham! and MAKE IT BIG!)
It's written in the same hyperbolic hard-sell tone employed by the periodical to foist such quality gamepaks such as Ghost Lion and the California Raisins game onto the impressionable youth of late 1980's America, which is quite disconcerting considering the choice of artists featured. Of the three, only Debbie Gibson was an actual chart success at the time (though I still am unable to understand how that came to be). Huey Lewis and the News had already taken the first steps on the road to state fair appearances, and Julian Lennon, living proof that talent (unlike appearance) can't be genetically transmitted, had already basked in his necrotic fifteen minutes of public fascination a few years prior.

I assume the decision on which artists to spotlight came down to least offensive denominator, so as not to scare off the parents who actually paid for the games pimped in the pages of Nintendo Power, hence no South of Heaven or Locust Abortion Technician. I can understand that line of reasoning, but there must have been other acts able to meet Nintendo's vetting process, ones with proven tweener appeal and whose hypetastic "Sound Waves" blurb didn't require committing "...and clearly shows he is following in the footsteps of his talented father (late Beatle John Lennon)" to immortality via the printed page.

Or involve Huey Lewis at all

It's not like I would have noticed, anyhow. The period from roughly 1985 to 1989 was something of a pop interregnum for me, a time when I effectively unplugged myself from the contemporary music grid. My burgeoning appreciation for 60's pop, rock, and especially soul music, combined with the death of V-66, a local music video station and my main means of keeping up with music trends, worked to suspend my interest in anything recorded after 1972.

I apparently didn't miss much, either:

Granted, the pop charts are inherently weighted toward the crap end of the spectrum, and show only the narrowest view into an given era's musical legacy. There was plenty of outstanding stuff released during those years, but even if I wasn't bopping to the backbeat of some mid-60's Stax recording, the chances I'd have discovered gems like XTC's Oranges and Lemons or New Order's Technique or Billy Bragg's Worker's Playtime on my own back then were pretty much nil.

My peers at the time were either budding juvenile delinquents or (worse) Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts. The musical tastes of both groups ran the wide gamut from hard rock to heavy metal, and took every iota of willpower I possessed to resist indoctrination. Seriously, I was this close to thinking that Rush was a brilliant band before I managed to pull myself back from the all-consuming abyss. The handful of kids in Woburn who were hep to what was then called the "college rock" scene didn't run in the same circles as I did, and, truth be told, they also tended to be pricks and not really the type of folks I'd take listening advice from.

It wasn't until I got into punk (by way of thrash metal) that I again started listening to music that wasn't recorded before I was born. The ready availability of cheap used vinyl made it easy to play catch up and discover most of what I missed out on the first time around (and then some) and take chances on things that I'd have otherwise passed up on checking out. I don't regret the hiccup in development of my musical tastes at all. If anything, I appreciate the advantage in approaching commonly known material as a outsider has conferred on several occasions. Nostalgia's lens flare tends to throw off one's ability to focus properly.

For the musical portion of today's program, here are three tracks released in 1988-89 from bands that did not earn a blurb in Nintendo Power, but have earned my (belated) Seal of Approval:

Babes in Toyland - He's My Thing (from Spanking Machine, 1989) - If Siouxsie Sioux fronted the Cramps...

My Bloody Valentine - (When You Wake) You're Still In A Dream (from Isn't Anything, 1988) - Spike-heeled shoegaze.

Orchids - If You Can't Find Love (from Lyceum, 1989) - Live twee or cry.