take a look at this from top to bottom

A friend pointed this site out to me the other day, with the comment that I "shoulda done this." I get respectable number of emails every day hyping and promoting some band or another. Some are slick PR pieces, complete with attached digital presskits, whipped up by professional promoters. Others are sent directly from the bands themselves. Even though most of the material really isn't to my tastes or not easily contextualized as an annotation to an old Captain Marvel story, it's flattering to be noticed...though given recent events, maybe willful obscurity is a wiser course of action.

In any case, I've never been able to bring myself to publicly pillory any of these desperate contenders for my listening attention, no matter how lousy the music or how overblown the hype. (Well, except for that one time where I redacted the names of the parties involved.) As I said then, and many times before, I am not an arbiter of public taste. Do you really need me to tell you that jam bands are antithesis of all that is good and decent?

This is all ground I've covered before, except for one enigma which I finally believe I have resolved. An astonishing number of the acts represented in the promotional emails hew very close to the AOR template established by the Dave Matthews Band/Maroon 5/circa 1996 Goo Goo Dolls. I find that style of music to be aggressively bland and unlistenable in the extreme, but that's beside the point. What baffled me was that someone would be actively and unironically pimping the spiritual heirs of Phil Collins and Michael McDonald to the hipster-heavy music blogging scene. Or that anyone would earnestly hitch their wagons to that particular tired genre star in the year 2008 in the first place.

It eventually dawned on me that what I was seeing were working bands, ambitious lads and lasses with residencies at the local college bar or crab shack, seeking to crack into the big time. It's an understandable dream, but while their inoffensive sound might go well with a plate of softshells, a bottle of microbrew, and some inane conversation, it doesn't carry well to the world outside the realm of soft rock radio.

It's like choosing practical over theoretical study -- the former will likely net you steady work, but the latter offers the better chance of making a massive breakthough and universal acclaim. There is no shame in choosing either path, but transitioning between the two can be difficult. Easier, I think, to just accept the situation and carve a profitable niche in Mix 98.5's AOR ghetto*. Today's hipster darlings are tomorrow's forgotten heroes, but Michael Bolton's stream of royalties is eternal.

If folks do intend to keep sending me info about new artists, however, here's a prime example of what I am interested in listening to...

Statues - Living in Lines (from New People Make Us Nervous, 2008; also available on eMusic) - Top-notch Canadian punk/power pop pointed out to me by a reader (to which I will forever be grateful). The rest of the album is in the same fist-pumping, boot-tapping vein and fills my bitter heart with hope for the future of hooky, well-crafted power pop.

If you go the eMusic route in picking this one up, swing by and nab the Tranzmitors' eponymous 2007 album for more killer punk pop from the Great White North...or if you're low on downloads for this month, just pick up "Alma Blackwell." You won't be sorry.

*I will always remember Mix 98.5, one of the Boston market's many lite rock stations, for the TV ad they ran featuring Janine Turner a few years back. In the spot, the GOP shill-slash-actress let potential listeners know that the station playlist did not contain "lyrics that will embarrass you in front of your kids." Y'know, the same kids who are grooving to "Do Me in Da Butt," by Ephebe Jailbait. Come to think of it, the ad might have been for Magic 106, after all...

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.

birthdays ought to be tubular

The World's Most Adorable Comics Blogging Bull turns six today! In honor of the joy that Bully has brought to a venue often frought with aggravation and stupidity, I offer this fine slice of punk pop whimsy that touches upon the Blessed Bovine's known interests...

The Valves - Ain't No Surf in Portobello (from a 1978 single) - From one of the lesser known lights of Britpunk High's Class of '77, this track is an Anglocentric predecessor to The Gremies' "No Surfing in Dorchester Bay," and further proof that the lack of surfability is not restricted to a single geographic location.

Sorry, my little stuffed pal, but you'll have to shoot the curl elsewhere...

if a seem a little jittery

A "minor" snow storm rolled into New England today. Because the approaches to AT headquarters on scenic Mt. Misery can get a little dicey in snowy conditions, my wife and I left work early to avoid the worst of it.

We got on I-93 North at the Columbia Road exit at 1:15 PM. We got off the highway at the Medford Square exit around 4:30 in the afternoon. That's eleven miles travelled in the space of three hours and fifteen minutes.

Oh, and I hurt my hand trying to punch a pickup truck through the driver's side window of Super Lumina.

So consider it a minimal content kind of day.

The Nips - So Pissed Off (from Bops, Babes, Booze, and Bovver, 2000) - Shane MacGowan, here fronting his pre-Pogues punk pop band, understands how I feel. It's like we're spiritual brothers, right down to the bad teeth (though I have a comprehensive dental plan in my corner) and the disturbing hissing laugh.

looked around and wondered can this be

The many sinister aspects of Morgan Edge, President of the Galaxy Broadcasting System:

He's a ruthless businessman.
(Yes, that's Don Rickles up there with him. No, I don't feel like explaining it.)
He's a tyrannical boss.
He's the secret capo of a cosmic crime cartel with ties to an extra-dimensional dictator.
...and most heinous of all...
He's a Trekkie.
Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk? (from a 1979 single; collected on Spizz Not Dead, 1996) - Would a Spizz by any other name (-energi, -oil, Athletico '80) sound as sweet? (And to answer the question posed by song's title, he's currently doing commericals for Priceline, winning acclaim for his role on Boston Legal, and, I presume, developing a treatment for TekWar: The Broadway Musical.)

Halloween Countdown: October 17 – you just painted me green

Found while perusing a copy of Swing With Scooter #31 (November 1970):
Dig the ad copy, which was apparently written by an acolyte of E.H. Bronner:

MORE! MORE! Owwwwww!
I admit that convincing the youth demographic about the virtues of owning a scale replica of Jonathan Frid would be something of an uphill battle, no matter how cold, clammy, or flexible said replicas may be. Still, the ad functions not so much an enticement to buy the product as a desperate warning to the unwary.

Either that, or a transcript of most disturbing in situ coital talk ever spoken.

The Damned - Grimly Fiendish (from Phantasmagoria, 1985) - Maybe when this countdown is over, I'll get around to discussing the memory hole and capricious revisionism as it pertains to music and popcult criticism. For now, I'm just going to state that my affection for Phantasmagoria has remained constant against the shifting tides of critical assessment.

setting things right

I have to confess that Myron's comment on this post made me feel a little guilty about the (unintentional) bait-and-switch nature of post's title. See, the title was a reference to the multi-dynastic Canadian teen drama Degrassi (Jr. High, High, The Next Generation), or more specifically, to the name of a song played by Zit Remedy, the show's token "lets form a band" subplot device, back in 1989.

While I'm on the subject of Degrassi, what the hell has happened to the current incarnation of the show? I accept that I am not the intended target audience, but the transition over the past couple seasons from a thoughful examination of all things teen to a grainy Canuck photostat of The OC has been downright depressing. The ongoing process of Sassy-fication has led Maura to give up on the show -- and this is a woman who watched Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Charmed to the bitter end.

Back to the matter at hand, to make good on Myron's or any other readers' dashed expectations, here's a shiny, new, straight-from-the-series capture of the song in question. There are other versions circulating out on the 'net, but the quality of the rips is universally dismal and lack that special bitterandrew touch.

Zit Remedy - Everybody Wants Something

...and while I'm here, I might as well throw this completely unrelated celebration of youthful hijinx at you:

Fast Cars - The Kids Just Wanna Dance (from a 1979 single; collected on Coming...Ready or Not!, 2001) - Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to see a proper CD release of this band's material. Not that I'm complaining; the band's occasional appearances on various bootleg punk and power pop compilations usually justified the purchase in and of themselves. The otherwise reliable Manda and the Marbles recorded a disappointing cover of this track on 2005's Angels with Dirty Faces which made the grevious sin of reducing the song to a repeated chorus.

Vacation: Day 7 - Too tired to rock

The whole point of this stay-at-home vacation was to relax and recharge, so why do I feel more tired today than I did a week ago?

M'n'M's - I'm Tired (from a 1980 single) - I could have sworn I've posted this track already, yet a quick search of the archives turned up no evidence that I had. It's a rather nice, if slight, bit of new wave girl pop that all the cool kids seem to be into.

Eddie Cochran - Twenty Flight Rock (from Somethin' Else: The Fine Lookin' Hits of Eddie Cochran, 1998) - As featured in the 1956 sex comedy, The Girl Can't Help It. Jayne Mansfield and a roster of early rock and rollers? That's cinematic perfection in my book.

(Although the film snob in me would argue that Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is the apex of Frank Tashlin's work in the genre, it's hard to top a movie that, while a retread of Born Yesterday, captures Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran in top form and in glorious Cinemascope.)

up on the roof, out on the street

I have been informed that today is a very special day. The Armagideon Time reader, close friend of Maura's, and all-around cool cat known to the world as "klah," is celebrating her birthday today, and I would like to extend my fondest birthday wishes to her.

Here's a double-layer cake of femvox punk pop in honor of the libris regina of sunny Pasadena. Happy birthday, klah!

Sahara Hotnights - Rockaway Beach (from The Song Ramones the Same, 2002)

The Dents - One More Time (from Time for Biting, 2006)

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)

he lay face down in the desert sand

A couple weeks back, my father and I were talking about old television shows, and he brought up Bonanza. Specifically, he noted that no matter how many times Commander Adama and his brood at the Ponderosa helped out the townsfolk, every time a horse was stolen, livestock was poisoned, or an accidental death occurred, the neighbors broke out the hanging rope, rifles, and pitchforks and marched on the hapless Cartwrights. “So it’s a microcosm of the American public, then,” I said.

Which is why, as disappointed as I am with the failure of the Democrats to put a stop to Bush’s bloody misadventure, I can’t fault them too much. Of course, I never thought they’d manage to do anything about it when I cast my ballot back in November. I’d have loved to been that confidently optimistic, but I was thinking more about pragmatism, the politics of spite, and the end of rubber stamp confirmations. Otherwise, I would have been content to let the GOP wallow in the shitpile of their own design so that the stink would linger for decades to come, rather than see them pass the buck of mismanagement off on the opposition. (I’m not dismissing the importance of the human costs, American or Iraqi or Afghan, but I never harbored illusions of improvement based on a single congressional election, either.) I was, and still am, hopeful that the rightward momentum has been slowed, if not halted, but any fruits of such a shift are still past the horizon.

“The people voted the Democrats in to end the war” is a misleading statement in many aspects. Some certainly did, others did it as a protest vote against GOP candidates embroiled in local scandals or the overall culture of corruption that had gone unchecked during the Bush administrations. Some voted out of spite. A lot of folks simply didn’t vote at all. It’s very hard find a consensus about what ending the war means to the individual voters who make up the American electorate. Polls may show that a majority of Americans oppose the war or consider it to have been a “mistake,” but oversimplify a wide range of viewpoints from immediate withdrawal to a gradual phase-out to an all-out push – under “better” management -- to win and then leave.

One intractable problem is that regardless of whether or not a majority of Americans want out of Iraq, any means of accomplishing that end is up against the core tenets of the American creed: We are good. We don’t make mistakes...maliciously intended ones, at least. (Enslavement of who? Smallpox blankets? I don't know what you're talking about, revisionist moonbat. And that was a long time ago, so no one is to blame.) We (especially the military) are capable of achieving anything as long as our will doesn’t falter.

Jello Biafra once said that the problem with America was “Vince Lombardi Disease,” a sense that winning was all that mattered. I’d add to that axiom of national identity the Duke’s famous line, “Never apologize and never explain, it's a sign of weakness." As frustrating as it may be to saner folk, there is a substantial segment of the populace who would rather embrace the madness of the sunk loss fallacy than acknowledge our limitations and our fuck ups as a nation. They may want the war to end, but they do not want to face the consequences of the misadventure. They’re hoping it can somehow get wished into the cornfield and go on as if nothing ever happened.

And so the Democrats are stuck, with a slim majority (with Senate control hinging on keeping the pro-war Joe Lieberman placated and the health of a senator who recently underwent extensive cranial surgery for a congenital circulation problem) and all the other baggage that comes with being a broad coalition party. They should have fought harder against Bush’s veto of the war funding bill, for sure. Even if it was a doomed effort, they didn’t need to cave so quickly or completely. (If it was me, I’d have kept submitting the same bill, over and over, with only minor changes just to be a prick. I would never get elected to public office, though.) At the same time, given the fickle nature of the public and Bush’s obstinacy (some might say “idiocy”), it was a foregone result, especially when “The Troops” were invoked by White House supporters.

It’s a hoary incantation, but one that still carries resonance with the public. Conflating the well being of those fighting with the desires of those making the policy has a long history of paying dividends, and provides an effective way for the pro-war set to rally after their plans go down in flames. “Stabbed in the back” myths or the idea that “The politicians lost the war, not the military” are boons for the warmongers. (The unconditional surrender policy adopted by the Allies during World War II was adopted in part because they wanted no ambiguity about the defeat of the German Army, which the National Socialists had capitalized upon after the First World War.) Few ever consider calling out the people who put the troops into harm’s way in the first place (and defunded veterans’ benefits, hospitals, and the like, to boot), so becomes an effective bit of misdirection that feeds into the sunk loss morass, where one tragic/noble casualty begets others and so forth and so on until the veteran’s cemeteries, amputee wards, and head injury hospices are full to bursting.

It’s extremely hard to effective argue against it in the public arena, because the truth is so unpalatable for the general populace. Nor should it be, as ugly and stark a truth it is, but again, it’s not what the people want to hear, especially ones with direct experience in the matter, even though it’s exactly what we all need to acknowledge. Thus effective action gets derailed by a sense of decorum - either cynical or sincere - or lack of nerve, and the few politicians with the courage of their convictions find themselves standing at the gates of the Ponderosa, trying to placate an angry mob.

Americans want their fictional heroes to be mavericks, but would rather not have to deal with them in everyday life. The Democrats may lack resolve, but so do most members of their constituencies.

Lorne Greene – Ringo (from Real 60’s: Country, 2004) - Did the post follow the song selection? Or the song selection follow the post? This song made it to the top of the pop charts from a few weeks in 1964. I wish I had a voice like Lorne Greene’s – deep, rugged, and manly – instead of the slightly nasally alto I got stuck with.

Go Betty Go – You’re Your Worst Enemy (from the Worst Enemy EP, 2004) – One of “the wife’s bands,” although I profess a certain fondness for their fiery brand of femvox punk pop. That reminds me: I asked my wife to write a guest post last winter, and she seemed amenable to the idea, but she never got around to it. I should follow up on that.

The Thingies – Mass Confusion (from a 1967 single; collected on The Thingies Have Arrived, 1998) – A fine bit of obscure 60’s garage rock from Austin, Texas by way of Topeka, Kansas. I was tempted to make a joke about confusing mass, weight, and specific gravity here, but I figured I’d go easy on you folks today.

Hues Corporation – Rock the Boat (from Rock the Boat: Golden Classics, 1993) – But, but, but…I might get wet, and thus be forced to acknowledge conditions outside my insular little world!

Friday Night Fights: Metalworking with Power Girl

Here Kara Zor-L demonstrates the processes of drop forging and cold rolling...

(from Justice League of America: Another Nail #2, 2004; art by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer)

That sense of unbridled confidence and willingness to jump fist first into a fight is why I think Power Girl is a nifty character. To be perfectly honest, I never even noticed her cup size until it had become a running sophomoric joke within fandom and in the comics themselves. I first encountered the character in the 70's JSA run in All Star Comics, where all the women had massive bosoms and wasp waists, thanks to penciller Joe Staton's unique take on female anatomy. I suppose it was to be expected that creators would pick up on a single aspect of Power Girl and beat it into the fucking ground. (Also see: Green Arrow, Hawkman, and any other character reduced to a flat caricature inspired by a couple lines of dialogue in a thirty or forty year old story.)

It's a shame that it was that particular aspect that got picked up upon, as Power Girl is the most relatable member of the extended Superman family. No boring Christ parables or po' faced reguritation of juvenile Silver Age ephemera -- just a supremely confident and independent person who relishes the opportunity to use her gifts and is willing to call bullshit when the need arises.

Sahara Hotnights - Alright Alright (Here's My Fist Where's the Fight) (from Jennie Bomb, 2001) - I saw these ladies have a new album out. This video didn't instill me with a lot of confidence, though. Maybe it's a Swedish thing -- a constant struggle against one's inner ABBA, always threatening to break loose and smother all other musical inclinations (hooky punk pop, in this case) beneath a mass of pop treacle. (I'm only a quarter Swede, so it has only manifested in an irrational love for "One Night in Bangkok.")

(Bahlactus has issued the clarion call...)

love me, love my action figure collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t leave her if I tried

Has it really been a year? Wow.

This post marks the first anniversary of Armagideon Time. When I launched this project on May 3, 2006, I was certain that I wouldn’t make it through six weeks before I got bored and packed it in. I came close on a couple of occasions, but there always seemed to be someone around at just the right moment to whisper words of encouragement and praise in my ear.

It took me a while to find my voice. When I started off, I tried my hardest to force myself into the role of a music critic and historian, but it was never an easy fit and I eventually gave up trying. Then, in an Archimedes-in-the-bathtub moment, I hit upon the notion of doing “theme” posts, and I started to hit my stride. Besides, I’m somewhat ambivalent about formal music criticism; I enjoy reading it when it’s done well, but it’s a rare occasion when overly detailed analyses manage to capture what makes a given piece of music a success or a failure, especially when lensed though the many-fold prism that is “personal taste.”

Given the choice, I’d rather just relate a personal anecdote, popcult reference, or random factoid to set the tone, and let the music speak for itself. I think this approach works, based on the fact that there are a hundred of you who make the effort to visit the site on a regular basis. (“Only a hundred?” you may ask. I’ve never been comfortable with being proactive on the self-promotion front, so the growth in readership has been an organic affair, helped along by the occasional kind mention here and there. Or you can see it as a bit of cyber-gnosticism, a hidden little cabal where the cool kids hang out but need to find the hidden doorway before entering the clubhouse. It’s also why I don’t beg for comments.)

I’m amazed whenever someone cites Armagideon Time as a positive example of or a favorite music blog, especially when the person giving the praise is able to codify what the heck it is I’m doing when I myself am not sure most of the time. Assessing a project from the trenches is hard to do, and it’s very comforting (and flattering) to discover that maybe, just maybe, I’m not completely making a terrible mess of things.

So, yeah, a big thanks to everyone who helped this blog make it as far as it did: the readers, fellow bloggers (as represented in the “Other Places of Note” links in the sidebar), and most importantly, my wife Maura, who has been patient and supportive regarding the whole project…even if she will never understand why Shampoo’s “Trouble” is such a great song.

No particular theme for this momentous occasion, just a small assortment of tracks culled from my “Current Favorites” Winamp playlist.

The Clash – Kick It Over (from Singles Box, 2006) – My favorite of the two 12” dub mixes of “Armagideon Time” The Clash recorded.

Benny Goodman – Sing, Sing, Sing (from Greatest Hits, 1996) – Yeah, it’s the one bit of swing jazz that everybody knows, but it still gives me chills each and every time I hear it. It’s also one of the few songs where “drum solo” doesn’t mean “slow, painful torture.”

The Monkees – I’m a Believer (from More of the Monkees, 1967) – I make no apologies. I’m a pop functionalist; the internal processes involved in production don’t matter, only the end result.

The Wall – When I’m Dancin’ (from a 1982 12” single, collected on No Future: Punk Singles Collection, Vol. 2, 1997) – Note-perfect punk pop, made all the more special because I discovered it unexpectedly on a collection of so-so UK82 band b-sides. The wife and I had it played during our wedding reception.

just to be alive, just a’one more day

Today’s post is about immortality, of a sort.

When my mother was a teenager she dug up a clump of the little blue wildflowers that grew on nearby Bucky’s Hill and transplanted them at the edge on my grandparents’ yard.

My mother is gone, a victim of an untied shoelace and the balance-inhibiting affects of port wine. Bucky’s Hill is gone, a victim of real estate developers who bulldozed the land flat and filled in the neighboring peat bog in order to drop down a rather prison-like condo complex on the site.

The little blue flowers in my grandmother’s yard have thrived and spread over the past four decades. From mid to late April, the side of the yard by the driveway becomes a cerulean carpet of tiny blossoms, a memorial far more suitable for my mother than any inscription on a slab of cold granite could ever be.

When my wife and I moved into the new house in 2004, I brought some of the plants with me, as a sentimental gesture in honor of my mom. I tried planting them in several locations around the yard, but with no success. I assumed that the soil up here on the hill just wasn’t suitable for that type of plant, and gave up trying after the fourth or fifth round of failures.

Yesterday, my wife and I were out on the patio surveying the storm damage and how our perennials were faring in the cold, wet weather, and my wife called for me to check out something in the bed where the lilies and bleeding hearts are planted. It was a solitary little blue flower, peeping up through the mud and the husks of last year’s annuals. I certainly didn’t plant it there, yet there it was – a random wonder in a random universe.

electric eels – Cards and Fleurs (from God Says Fuck You, 1992) – A swell bit of Cleveland proto-punk that begins like a fever dream and ends like a punch in the nose.

Los Abandoned – Como la Flor (from the Los Abandoned EP, 2004) – My wife has a cluster of friends in LA who keep her abreast of the local pop and punk scenes, and occasionally send her CD’s of bands she might enjoy, which is where I first came across Los Abandoned’s excellent brand of bilingual punk pop.

Here’s the video for their equally outstanding “Van Nuys Es Very Nice”:



100 Flowers – 100 Flowers (from 100 Years of Pulchritude, 1990) – Originally LA punk pranksters The Urinals, following a Maoist-inspired name change and a switch to an art punk sound reminiscent of Wire, The Fall, and/or The Minutemen.