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.

Halloween Countdown: October 9 - spreading the disease

Sorry, bats and ghouls, but Unca Andrew is feeling a little under the weather today. I have contracted a delightful little virus. It's symptoms are mild enough by day, but turn into uncontrollable shakes and a high fever once the sun goes down. As I have no way to tell if this night will be any different than the previous two, I'm going to make the most of my daylight hours while I can (by napping and playing videogames, naturally).

three hundred more years

From the pages of Mystery in Space #5 (December 1951-January 1952) comes this prescient glimpse into mankind's glorious future...as made possible by the unmatched killing power of the S-64 Disintegrator Gun:

...and by "Earth," we mean "America."
Thus S'less'thar, revered shaman and a cephalapod of peace, passed from this world. The rest of the I'lloni tribe had little time to mourn his passing, as they sooned joined him in radioactive oblivion. A Space Wal-Mart now marks the place where they died.
"So, any of you ugly motherfuckers know if there's oil around these parts? You've got fifteen seconds to answer."
"...and God help anyone stupid enough to challenge our Divine mandate to rule."
Hey, you can't argue with "Spaceman-ifest Destiny." (Not if you like being non-disintegrated, that is.)

Depeche Mode - Barrel of a Gun (from Ultra, 1997) - Catching up with the Industrial Dance Pop Scene? Or perhaps Music for the Goth Club Masses?

The Flesh Eaters - Disintegration Nation (from a 1978 single; collected on No Questions Asked, 2004) - The Flesh Eaters tend to get lumped in with the L.A. deathrock crowd, but aside from a slight arty inclinations and occasionally macabre subject matter, I don't really hear the connection...just some straight up, rough-edged punk rawk.

chainsaw massacre mon amour

From the letters page of the October 1983 issue of Fangoria magazine on comes this transatlantic appel du coeur:


I wonder if any of Fangoria's three or four female readers (which, like dark matter and the Higgs boson, are a purely theoretical supposition) took this Charles Boyer du cinéma d'horreur up on his offer, and exchanged passionate letters about their shared love of The Beast Within and I Spit on Your Grave.

"Oh, mon ami, when saw I the photo of you in red food coloring and corn syrup covered, my heart, it lept. Someday soon together shall we be, Basket Case watching and searching Fulci zombie films from street vendors du bootleg video...."

Les Beatlettes - C'est Grâce À Toi (from Girl Group Power, Histoires de Filles: Quebec 60's Go-Go Music) - If I hadn't posted a Me First & The Gimme Gimmes track recently, I'd have gone with their cover of Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love" in a heartbeat. As it is, you'll just have to settle for this Francophone rendition of a Supremes classic, which shows that it is possible to have some infectious girl group fun without diluting one's sense of cultural identity.

Comix - Touche Pas Mon Sexe (from BIPPP: French Synth Wave 1979-85, 2008) - I learned about this compilation of vintage French synth wave from Joe over at Last Days of Man on Earth, and I owe him big time for the heads-up, as it has become my hands-down choice for favorite album of 2008. (Its melancholic electronic futurism was also responsible for dislodging the "Philadelphia Freedom" earworm I picked up during my second dental abcess of the year.)

Erasure - Oh L'amour (from Wonderland, 1986) - There's nothing Gallic about this one apart from the title, but we could all use a bit more confectionary synthpop in our lives. (If you responded to that with "not me," then I especially mean you, buster.)

Note: There's a new post up at the other blog in which I tackle a work of classical literature at the behest of a friend.

roll for critical fumble

When I was stuck at my grandma's house a couple weeks back, I unearthed my well-worn copy of the 4th edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide. It was published in 1991, just before the alternative rock scene went mainstream. In those days before information on obscure indie and punk bands was a mere Google search away, the Guide was an invaluable resource when it came to deciding which albums and artists to keep an eye out for at the local record shops.

There was a time (back when I rode the Christian Herter scholarship gravy train) when my mornings were spent copying out promising leads from the Guide onto index cards and my afternoons were spent wandering from one used vinyl store to another in search of the objects of ephemeral desire. As a result, my copy of the guide is, how you say, "beat to shit," missing its cover, its spine bent into a c-shape, and the pages stuffed with clippings and photos of interest to me at the time.

Eventually I migrated to The Guinness Who's Who of Indie and New Wave Music and a number of microgenre directories as my sourcebooks of choice, as they better matched my specific musical interests and covered artists not included in Trouser Press. The fact that the writing in those other directories was a little more even-handed was also played an important factor, because as handy as Trouser Press was for determining release dates and album titles, the commentary and capsule reviews in the book frequently reached toxic levels of "jaded hipster" and "rockist" attitude.

Certain bands were especially singled out for critical maulings in which informational content took a back seat to self-satisfied rants permeated with the phony idolatry of rockist mythology, where the mythic (and false) aura of authenticity is all that matters. I noticed it back in 1993, but it was even more obnoxious to revisit fifteen years later, as my tastes have shifted and broadened and I've gained a bit more knowledge about the artists, the ideologies, and the music involved.

It's all very silly and pointless. What you may claim to be the pinnacle of pop genius, I might find to be kind of pedestrian, and vice-versa. Our individual tastes are our own, and that's nothing to be ashamed about...unless you are a Katy Perry fan, in which case I hope the Fates are kinder to you in your next incarnation. Savaging INXS for not being Elvis Costello might make for some unintentional laughs, but it's also quite pathetic. (Besides. I'd rather listen to Kick than Armed Forces any day of the week.)

Here are some excerpts from some of the more egregious rockist rants from my copy of the Trouser Press Guide, deliberately chosen with certain readers of this blog in mind.

Orange Juice:

Glasgow's insufferably coy Orange Juice, de facto leaders of the Scottish neo-pop revolution, typified a UK trend towards clean, innocent looks that unfortunately spilled over into the music.

Orange Juice - Falling and Laughing (from You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, 1982) - It's true. MTV and Smash Hits ruined everything. God forbid that someone who knows how to tune a guitar and doesn't look like a refugee from a Bowery methadone clinic becomes a chart success.

Oingo Boingo:

This eight-piece LA outfit (with three-man horn section) started out trying to be a West Coast answer to XTC and Devo, but suffered from studied wackiness/quirkiness and managed to hide solid cleverness behind overproduction and hamminess.

Oingo Boingo - Wild Sex (in the Working Class) (from Nothing to Fear, 1982) - Wow. That's reading an awful lot into what I always thought of as pretty entertaining party music.

Conflict:

In the real/rock world, only the young and the gullible expect their favorite bands to abide by lofty personal standards.

Conflict - The Guilt & The Glory (from It's Time to See Who's Who, 1983) - I don't entirely disagree with the above statement (in an otherwise positive write-up) about the stalwart anarchopunk outfit, except that the "real/rock" part makes me want to punch somebody and for the fact that Minor Threat, the most generic-sounding hardcore band ever, was praised for wearing their hearts on their sleeves in their Guide entry.

Pet Shop Boys:

The in-joke references and self-amused esoterica strewn thoughout songs like "West End Girls" and "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" should have precluded their general popularity, but evidently the laxative-smooth synth backing has utilitarian value for clubgoers. Ghastly, depressing and offensive.

Pet Shop Boys - Suburbia (from Please, 1986) - Pop sensibility and synthesizers are anathema to rockists....until some cherished rock idol appropriates them for his own use, at which point there's only a 50% chance the purists will howl for his blood.

--------------------

In other news, there's a new post up at pronounced WOO-BIN on the subject of local geography.

multiversal bandstand

The Batusi may be the most (in)famous of novelty dances inspired by comic book characters, but there were scores of others that never managed to register on the masscult consciousness. Here's a brief rundown of some of the more notable ones:

The Element Man - A visually exciting set of moves set this dance apart from the rest of the pack, but the fact that only those who had been exposed to the Orb of Ra could properly perform the steps kept it from achieving widespread appeal.

The Funky Robot - Easy to perform, with low rhythmic requirements, the Funky Robot's strengths turned out to be its greatest weakness. So easy that even one's super-dad could do it, the dance quickly became associated with polyester-addicted squares and new age family therapy sessions.

The Tula-Hula - A huge hit at Dr. Dorsal's Deep Sea Discoteque (sic), this five-fathom fad bit the dust when astronomical litigation fees (stemming from an unexpected migration of tiger sharks onto the dancefloor) forced Dorsal to shutter his doors.

The Kirby Shuffle - He's just one man! But he busts moves like a whirlwind! There ain't no stoppin' him! He's like a one man rave!

The Hypno Hustle - This interesting attempt to mix disco and subliminal indoctrination might have made a bigger impact if the required modifications to the club's PA system weren't as prohibitively expensive. Blame the Latverian glitter ball embargo of 1977.

The Roly Poultry - Hyped as the successor to the Macarena and The Ketchup Song dance, the Roly Poultry fad died a quiet well-deserved death within hours of its debut. This has not, however, stopped lesser DJs or drunken great-uncles from occasionally trying to resuscitate the abomination on the wedding circuit.

The Jeffetty John - A sad reminder of the scene's creative bankruptcy, in which the moves of past crazes are awkwardly linked together and given a veneer of "shocking" edginess. Arguments regarding its popularity on the dance floor rarely take into the downward spiral of insularity that has gripped the subculture over the past two decades.

Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 Dances (from The Exciting Wilson Pickett, 1966) - The Hokey Pokey is Dance #231. The Taffy Pull is Dance #879. The Cabbage Patch is Dance #666.

Trans X - Safety Dance (from On My Own, 1988) - Changing hands from one Canadian synthpop act to another.

Schrödinger's landscape

Cambridge Road, Burlington MA, circa 1949
My maternal grandmother grew up in Woburn's west side, three steps from the Burlington line. Her father and grandfather worked at Cummings Farm, long since bulldozed and obliterated to make room for the shopping centers, condo complexes, and office parks that occupy the crowded stretch of Cambridge Road (and it will always be "road," not "street" for me) from Bedford Road to Route 128.

Traces of the Cummings estate still remain, as the bulk of Mrs. Cummings's substantial land holdings were bequeathed to the "children of the City of Boston" in a restrictive trust which eminent domain takings have only taken a small bite out of. Every so often there has been talk by Boston politicians to find a loophole to break the trust and sell the prime real estate, thus securing a huge windfall to fund projects like the Rose Kennedy Greenway or a 1:1 scale replica of the Sphinx -- bearing Tom Menino's face -- to be built on the South Boston waterfront that is Mayor Mushmouth's personal Valley of the Kings.

For now, though, the patches of forest and scrub between the office buildings and used car lots remain overgrown and beyond the reach of deep-pocketed developers. Every time I drive up that way with my grandmother, which is more times than I can count, she delivers the same series of nostalgic rambles about what the area used to be like when she was young.

"We used to race paper boats in that drainage ditch. My uncle drowned in that stream when he was trying out his new galoshes. He was six. I used to babysit for people up this hill. It seemed so steep back then. You could wander wherever, and no one would tell you to get off their land..."

The litany never varied, and became etched in my brother's head and mine through years of repetition. Even when I drive the stretch alone the routine of places and events queues up unbidden, a subconscious mantra and stuff of which family in-jokes are made.

On the way back from our weekly trips to Target, I'll occasionally take a detour through my old North Woburn stomping grounds, though it has become harder and harder to reconcile the visual input with the expectations of decades-old memories. The phantoms retain more substance than the present reality, and I still see the Tomato Hill sandpit or the seasonal marsh/skating pond in the woods in place of the subdivisions that now occupy those spaces.

From my late childhood through my mid-twenties, the pace of development in the area was glacial -- a single-family home here and office building there, but apart from the last lurching encroachments from the local industrial park, there was little in the way of rapid, drastic transformations of the landscape. What did occur was gradual enough to be easily internalized and placed in context. This not only applied to Woburn and its surrounding communities, but to the places in town where I used to spend my time -- Brighton Ave to Kenmore Square, Mass Ave from the MIT Bridge to Porter Square, Cambridgeport to Central Square, Porter Square to Davis.

Then came the real estate boom and tsunami of gentrification that came in wake of rent control being repealed in Cambridge. I also got a car and started driving again, which shifted my axis of operations away from the city and back to the suburbs. I work in Boston, but what I actually see of the city is mostly limited to a stretch of Morrissey Boulevard and the view from I-93. It's no great loss, to tell the truth. In this era of retail chains and global branding, the only difference between city and suburb is that the suburbs have better parking and slightly smaller chance of stepping in a puddle of human urine.

When I do make the rare trip into town, I find a landscape transformed beyond recognition, to the point (as in the time I met up with a friend in Davis Square) where I lose my bearings in places I've walked through dozens of times before. I can deal with the new well enough, but I've yet to encounter an instance of the "new" being an improvement rather than a bland upscale repurposing.

The nature of the changes filters back to me from my wife or from urbanocentric friends. Kenmore Square has been effectively eradicated. Allston has slowly been absorbed into the fiefdoms of Boston University and Harvard. Harvard Square has turned into a strip mall with pretensions of atmosphere and Central Square has gone from the home of radical bookstores and Cheapo Records to hosting The Gap.

There's no real reason to go back anymore, and I prefer to preserve my mental image of the landscape (including the stop sign in Kendall Square my pal Leech walked straight into in a golden moment of unintended slapstick) as it was back in 1994 in a dead/not dead state immune to the quantum flucutations of empirical evidence.

It does make me an unreliable source of driving directions, however.

Duran Duran - Careless Memories (from Duran Duran, 1981) - Infinitely preferable to "Careless Whispers."

Saint Etienne - It's All Gone Horribly Wrong (from The Misadventures of Saint Etienne, 1999) - A Japanese soundtrack album to an English film released only in Spain and which starred an American actress (Parker Posey, as per the Mandatory Posey Appearance Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994).

Svensk - Getting Old (from a 1967 single) - Psychedelic freakbeat is immune to the ravages of time.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality (from Architecture & Morality, 1981) - Brutalism is maladaptive.

waiting for the flash

Look at that sunavabitch go! Doesn't it just give you a tingly sensation all over, especially in the thyroid and reproductive organs? Since today happens to be the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I though it only proper to genuflect a little upon the event and its enduring legacy.

It was the ultimate product of the American "can do" spirit, the fireworks display that kicked off the beginning of the American Century (give or take a half-dozen decades). It showed the world that we had not only developed the means to end human civilization, but were also willing to use it if meant saving "a million lives" (or is that a billion now? Retroactive justifications are not immune to inflationary forces) or intimidating our uncomfortable Soviet allies with a display of overwhelming force upon a civilian target.


That last part worked so well that Joe Stalin's bunch of merry Bolsheviks wasted no time in acquiring some transuranic party poppers of their own, which wagered the future of the human race on a staring contest to end all staring contests. Fun times, indeed, especially for a kid whose global awareness was coming into sharp focus just as Ronnie Reagan decided to escalate the stakes in the name of God, country, and sweetheart defense contracts.

Flipping through issues of Discover and coming across absurdly cheery infographics about the science of the neutron bomb. Sneaking a peek at some of my father's National Guard manuals dealing with post-event assessment and body disposal. Lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I'd be one of the dead or one of the living who envied them. (Knowing what I know now about the target-rich environment of Boston's suburban ring and the power-over-accuracy doctrine of Soviet warhead design, it's clear I'd have been in the dead category, as anything inside I-495 would have become part of Boston Harbor after a full-on nuclear exchange.)

At least it all worked out in the end, right? America won the Cold War, or so I'm told. (How did you spend your promised peace dividend?) History ended, and we now live in a peaceful neo-liberal hegemony overseen by the bestest nation ever. The specter of radioactive annihilation is a thing of the past, a completely justified phase that we've put entirely behind us.

Strongarm sales of ABM equipment designed to provoke the Russians? Official efforts to make the use of tactical nuclear weapons acceptable to the American public? The same conglomerates which are responsible for spiking energy costs attempting to exploit the situation in order to build more nuclear power plants? You must be thinking of some dark alternate universe, friend.


Synch up your Doomsday Clocks, cats and kittens! We're packing a musical MIRV primed and ready to deliver megatons of melodic enjoyment, and you're standing at ground zero! The party doesn't stop until the last payload drops.

Crass - They've Got a Bomb (from The Feeding of the 5000, 1978) - When you've got a massive stockpile of hammers, everything looks like a nail.

Dr. Strangelove & The Fallouts - Love That Bomb (from a 1964 single; collected on Atomic Platters, 2005) - This peppy little track (most likely a Laurie Johnson effort) was released to promote Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of apocalyptic comedy. Go-go until you're gone-gone.

The Cure - A Strange Day (from Pornography, 1982) - A languid waltz to the shores of the abyss. The view from the edge is fantastic, I'm told.

The Epoxies - We're So Small (from The Epoxies, 2002) - Adieu, my fair synthpunkers! While I'm saddened to see you go, you've left a fine legacy of two outstanding albums, a handful of great b-sides and compilation cuts, and a not-so-good final EP.

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - I'm Gonna Dig Myself a Hole (from Gonna Be Some Changes: 1946-54, 2008) - A master bluesman goes underground, twenty-nine years before Paul Weller got the same idea.

the valet of the infantile

It's been an unusally hectic Sunday and yet another massive thunderstorm is bearing down upon the northwest suburbs of Boston, so I'm going to have to leave you to puzzle out this following sequence from "Poison Ivy," a gag strip from the rich vein of material that is Feature Comics #98, on your own...


The Units - Tight Fit (from Digital Stimulation, 1979) - Together in electric nightmares.

Sounds Incorporated - Sounds Like Movin' (from Rinky Dink, 1965) - I have made it clear in my will that this track will be used as my funeral march. Don't mourn, comrades, shake yer tailfeathers!

Vacation 2008: Day 5 - Objectivist hygiene

I've been slowly working my way through Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a very well-written examination of the legendary comics creator's life and body of work. Bell does an outstanding job of addressing not only Ditko's unique sense of aesthetics, but also the man's fiercely Objectivist philosophy and personal eccentricities, and their effect on his artistic style and professional career.

Nowhere is Ditko's evangelism for the Ayn Rand school of petty selfishness "enlightened self-interest" so fervent and unrestrained as in 1973's The Avenging World. Not so much a work of sequential art as a bizarre illustrated primer espousing Rand's political theories in the most lurid, brute-force method imaginable, The Avenging World reads like a Chick tract adaptation of Atlas Shrugged set in the Dread Dormammu's Dark Dimension -- entertainingly bat-shit in the way only an embarrassingly sincere and personal project by a talented eccentric can be.

That doesn't mean that reading The Avenging World is anything other than a tough slog through repetitive dissertations -- in comic strip, illustrated text, and infographic format -- on the primacy of "rational self-interest" over collective obligation. I trend toward the left-libertarian/anarcho-communist side of things myself, but I temper my views with liberal doses of cynical pragmatism. The uncompromising rightist Objectivism in The Avenging World refuses to partition the "is" from the "ought," which is why the ideology tends to be in practice more justification than aspiration. "A = A" is an abstraction, and as such, is a hollow mantra in a world where the messy and inconclusive are commonplace.

Swap out the abstract for the concrete, and the philosophical scenarios presented in The Avenging World would go something like this...

Ideological purity is no substitute for a can of Ajax and some elbow grease.

New Order - Age of Consent (from Power, Corruption, & Lies, 1983) - A musical selection whose sublime and fragile beauty I trust we can all agree upon.

Vacation 2008: Day 1 - Ain't gonna gamble

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

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

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

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

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

a grave condition

Dr. West's Magical Revivification Formula^TM! Another fine product from the Romero Corporation, a Skeletal Family Company!

(Side effects may include a shambling gait, a slight rotting aroma, and an irrational craving for the flesh of the living. Should your skin split and slough off of your wet, gleaming skull, discontinue use immediately.)

Given the known limitations of the four-color printing process on cheap newsprint, perhaps photographic testimonals weren't the wisest method of marketing a skin care product, especially when the rictus-grinning models looked like they just stepped in from a community theater production of Carnival of Souls.

Zombina and The Skeletones - Nobody Likes You (When You're Dead) (from Taste the Blood of Zombina and The Skeletones, 2002) - Well, nobody that you would necessarily want to like you, that is.

Thirteen at Midnight - Skin Deep (from a 1983 single) - The Not-Quite-Human League.

a champion of fools

A letter to the editor from the July 1983 issue of Blip ("The Video Games Magazine"):


A news item from the August 1983 issue of Blip:


Moebius - Video Soldier (from Video Soldier in a Radio War, 1982) - Martial chants for a digital age, an era when the battle lines were rendered in monochrome vectors set against featurless black voids and winning meant staving off inevitable oblivion for one more level.

(More on Moebius here.)

more than occasionally foolish

Bless me, St. Marlo, in my hour of need.
As reality has repeatedly ignored my demands that it conform to my myopic personal vision, I have have been left with no choice but to respond in a manner befitting a mature adult. Since the bugs have not yet been worked out of the holdmybreathuntiliturnblue HTML tags, I will have to resort to the power of HIATUS!

Yes, a honest-to-gosh suspension of effort, because there is no means of protest as powerful as choosing to do nothing at all. Do you think I'm joking? Do you think this is just a bluff masking my desperate need for attention?

I'll show you. I'll show you all. Bear witness to the power of....THE HIATUS!

Cue the theme music!

Jeff & Jane Hudson - The Girl from Ipanema (from 1982's World Trade EP)

......

......

......

......

......

......

......

......

There. I hope you've all learned a valuable lesson.

So, what did I miss while I was away?

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)

your chariot of the gods awaits

The Chihuahua Men of Sirius-7 walk among us! (At least the caption writer had the integrity to make appropriate use of quotation marks.)

It's one of the oldest tricks in the Handbook of Lazy Journalism: Take a current hot trend or media property, find a way to tie it back to some tangentially-related wire story, and from there stitch together a Frankenstein's monster consisting of equal parts press release and "news of the weird" item:

Joe Q. Jackson's skin has a pronounced greenish hue -- not because of gamma radiation, but because he has a rare skin disease. Few sufferers of the excruciatingly painful disease live past the age of thirty, but analysts are expecting Universal's The Incredible Hulk to break box office records when it premieres this Friday!

I know. I missed my true calling in life, but I take comfort in the fact that when I go to sleep each night, I do so free of the shame of trying to use war orphans and progeria victims to promote Sex in the City or the latest biblioturd squeezed out by Dan Brown.

If one were to take the tried and true formula outlined above and apply it to the slow-pitch softball arena of tweener mags at a time when the collective popcult consciousness was hyper-saturated with all things paranormal, the results would most likely resemble "Space: The Final Frontier" from the April 1978 of Pizzazz Magazine.

The article is a undercooked shepherd's pie of science fact, pseudo-scientific braggadocio, and a host of facile sci-fi references designed to kickstart the atrophy of the younger crowd's critical faculties, thus preparing them for the coming Reagan years and beyond...

(I've been referred to as "the Lysenko of retrologists.")

Dr. Hynek, whose twin careers of astronomer and "ufologist" can best be described as a long quest to have one's cake and eat it too, is absolutely right. It is far easier for me to imagine having my mind blown by some childlike alien Moog-and-laser-show enthusiasts than it is for me to imagine living under a militant imperial regime built on the ashes of a great republic.

In the year 2000, you will commute to work in your own personal Death Star! (Until the Alderaan branch office gets draconically downsized, that is.)

The musical portion of today's program is the stuff that myths are made of...

"There came a time when the Old Rock Gods died! The prog set died with the boogie rockers! The coked-out corporate behemoths perished, locked in battle with the flowers of anarchy unleashed! It was the last days for them! An ancient era was passing to the polyphonic waves of synthesized sound! Thus the New Wave of Gods were born!"

Nina Hagen - Gods of Aquarius (from ...in Ekstase, 1985)

Tubeway Army - Praying to the Aliens (from Replicas, 1979)

reach out and touch faith

My wife bought the above painting at a yard sale last Saturday. My first reaction upon seeing it was "Jesus was a human resources director?"

After some consideration, though, I realized that it made a lot of sense...

Good afternoon, please have a...no, no, you don't need to kneel or indulge in glossolalia, honest...please, have a seat.

Now you may be wondering why I wanted to meet with you. It's about your conduct as a member of this organization. I've reviewed your performance records and it seems to me that your actions frequently contradict our core precepts.

What? You say you've only been following what's in the employee handbook? Ah, I see. The thing is that when we were a small start up in the Levant, we never imagined the eventual scope or longevity of our operations, and so there's a lot of things in the manual that weren't meant to be taken outside very specific cultural and historical contexts. Because I was otherwise occupied at the time, the actual task of writing fell upon subcontractors, and their individual biases are reflected in the finished product.

And don't even get me started about the translation errors, my friend.

Confusing minutae aside, however, the handbook is very clear about the essence of our mission statement -- pacifism, forgiveness, forbearance, and compassion -- none of which seem to be reflected in your behavior as member of this organization.

Militarism? "Prosperity Gospel?" A rush to pass harsh judgement upon others? Turning spirituality into a pyramid scheme?

Really? This is really what you think we're supposed to be about, you id---

...

I'm sorry, forgive me. Occasionally my temper gets the best of me. (Just ask the moneylenders.) Be that as it may, it seems that your self-righteous fixation on details and has led you to overlook our actual mission statement, the "spirit," if you will, of what we actually stand for. In doing so, you have -- either intentionally or not -- propagated a creed that is fundamentally opposed to ours.

Even worse, you've presumed to do so in both my name and the name of this organization.

Though it pains me to do so, I must hand you this official reprimand. Think upon your mistakes and learn from them.

Go in peace.

Yeah, Jesus is quite the softie, unlike his father, who'd bring down plagues and lightning bolts on anyone caught accessing MySpace on company time.

King Missile - Jesus Was Way Cool (from Mystical Shit, 1990) - The Gospel According To That One Stoner That Shows Up At Every College Party.

Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (from Violator, 1990) - The Song Guaranteed To Be Played At Every College Party That One Stoner Shows Up At (Also, "Love Shack" and "She Sells Sanctuary". I'm not dating myself at all.)

guys and dolls

There are few things as disappointing as having a decent concept spoiled by an iffy personal agenda. Conn and Hal Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys, an attempt to enlighten the Playstation generation about the "lost" wisdom of folkways of yore, is the type of book that ought to appeal to me, yet comments made by the authors regarding the intent of the omnibus have left me loath to purchase a copy.

As a dilettante retrologist, I have a keen appreciation for efforts to preserve and present the fascinating parts of our collective cultural history that have fallen by the wayside, but it's that gender-specific qualifier, "for boys," that makes me pause. In the author's Amazon Q&A section, Conn Iggulden states, "You only have to push a boy on a swing to see how much enjoys the thrill of danger. It's hard-wired." It's a statement that smacks of biological determinism, and when placed alongside his complaints about raising a risk-adverse generation, suggests that the intent behind the book was not just about preserving vanishing folk wisdom, but an attempt to resurrect a mythicized version of traditional "rugged" masculinity, "snips and snails and puppy dog tails" versus "sugar and spice."

Which is bullshit, quite frankly. Bullshit which stems from reactionary discontent with modern liberal society and the gradual erosion of traditional gender roles. It's the same impulse that launched countless self-indulgent whines about "Daddy issues" and has created a thriving industry purposed to sell synthetic -- and quite depressing -- iterations of manliness to rubes convinced that they're missing out on something vital. I can empathize with those feeling a hunger of wholeness, but the idea that gender roles or a sense of personal identity can be purchased like a tin of shoe polish is wrongheaded for so many reasons.

While I've made an active effort to forget most of what I learned from my father on the subject of "what it is to be a man," there is one thing that has stuck with me. In reference to the manly-man gastronomic polemic Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, my father stated "Real men eat whatever the fuck they feel like." It's similar in sentiment to the Bard's "to thy own self be true," though with the additional benefit of some casual profanity, and if one changes "real men" to the gender-neutral "real individuals" it still applies in force.

You only have to push a child on a swing to see how much he or she enjoys the thrill of danger. It's hard-wired into children, period. Or not. Some kids are thrillseekers and others are cautious. It's a matter of temperament, not of sex, though the encouragement or discouragement of such traits is often shaped by the semi-transparent hand of gender role socialization (which is a damn shame). Rather than thinking that something has been lost because of the socio-cultural shifts regarding gender, it's more productive -- not to mention better for the theoretical child in question -- to embrace the wider vistas of self-expression and opportunity that have been opened.

So I think I'll pass on picking up The Dangerous Book for Boys. It would be a redundant purchase, anyhow, considering that I already have a few volumes of this, handed down to me by my mother, at my disposal:

(click for maximum edification)
That's the first half of the contents page for the third volume of The Book of Knowledge, 1951 edition. Part encyclopedia, part almanac, part DIY handbook -- it's the real deal, as opposed to a post-facto nostalgic recreation. Check out the range of subjects covered, all targeted toward the eight-to-twelve year olds of six decades ago. Something has been lost in the past half-century, but it has fuck all to do with presence of absence of a Y chromosome.

Mechanical Servants - Study Up! (from the Min X Match 12", 1980; collected on several bootleg minimal synth compilations) - A little bit of digging about the Mechanical Servants reveals that they were a female minimal synth duo that hailed from New York and their 1980 EP was released as a private pressing, though copies of the record can be found for quite reasonable prices (under $20) on eBay and elsewhere.

London Underground - Train of Thought (from a 1981 single; collected on the Atomic Shockwaves v. 13 compilation) - This one sounds a little like an early Killing Joke track...if said track was being broadcast by a failing automated low-power transmitter half a decade after a global thermonuclear exchange.

Yeah, I'm in a minimal synth/postpunk mood tonight. What of it?

visual synergy: the revolution will be synthesized

This Korg Poly-61 kills fascists! New wavers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your oversized shoulder pads!



Re-Flex - The Politics of Dancing (from The Politics of Dancing, 1983) - Are you now doing, or have you ever done, the hokey-pokey? I have in my hand a list of 57 highly-placed individuals who have put their left feet in and shaken them all about.



Duran Duran - New Moon on Monday (from Seven and the Ragged Tiger, 1983) - So the moral of the video is that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring in late 1960's Czechoslovakia would have succeeded if the pro-democracy forces had access to Simon Le Bon's pouty lips and Nick Rhodes's groovy hair?*

*Providing that the counterrevolutionary forces were armed with neon vibrators and not Kalashnikovs and Soviet tanks, of course.

tuned to a dead channel

Despite the large and ever-growing number of unread books in my collection, whenever I'm at a loss about what to read next I invariably gravitate to something chosen from a short list of well-loved favorites. The criteria for being part of that elect group of books isn't so much a matter of importance or literary merit, but rather stems from my personal and empirical experience as a reader. To put it simply, they are books I never tire of re-reading.

The list includes The Great Gatsby, The Loved One, Kidnapped, Raymond Chandler's "Phillip Marlowe" novels, Len Deighton's "Spy With No Name" books, Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy -- all read and re-read many times over with no signs of diminishing returns on their entertainment value. Also high up on the list is a novel I recently had the pleasure of revisiting and plan on discussing a little in today's post, William Gibson's Neuromancer.

The 1984 novel codified, if not created, the template for the "cyberpunk" genre, a hyper-stylized blending of noir and hard-sci elements with an emphasis on technology -- particularly cybernetics, computer/information science, and genetic engineering -- fraying the boundaries between man and machine. Many of the concepts and constructs presented in Neuromancer have since been appropriated into the popcultural fabric (and in the case of the virtual realm of the cyberspace, into reality), imitated and replicated to point of cliche. The novel's astonishing degree of influence makes it difficult to discuss properly in the space of a couple-hundred word blog post (or even a doctoral thesis), so in keeping with the micro-subjective spirit of Armagideon Time, I'm just going to indulge in some personal musings on the subject.

Like all works of sci-fi, Neuromancer is a product of its time, in this instance, the early 1980's, when the dying gasps of consensus-driven progress where drowned out by rushing sound of upwardly concentrating wealth and power and a the bleep-bloop din of revolutions in personal electronics and computing. It was a time when style was knowingly but unironically embraced over substance, which is reflected in the techno-lyricism of Gibson's prose, in passages such as this one...

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move too quickly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market...

...which make me despair over my own limitations as a writer. Chrome and surgically-fitted mirrorshades, the radiant geometric purity of cyberspace and the entropic grime of the east coast Sprawl -- the world of Neuromancer took its stylistic cues from both edges of the zeitgeist's blade.

That's not to say that the novel is a disposable exercise in superficiality. It is, at its core, an entertaining sci-fi take on the classic heist story, with Case the "Console Cowboy" and razorgirl Molly drawn into a fractally complicated job with tremendous ramifications. Gibson is adept at integrating the stylistic and technical flourishes into the novel as a whole.

This, and the moral ambiguity of the protagonists allows the author to indirectly offer socio-cultural insights without tipping over into the realm of techno-parable. Entertain, then edify. A common mistake made by other writers with aspirations of following in Gibson's thematic footsteps is to simply crib the superficial trappings of the cyperpunk genre, and use them as window-dressing for formulaic sci-fi material, swapping out the bubble helmets and bug-eyed aliens for cybernetic enhancements and monolithic corporations.

I read Neuromancer (and occasionally its two sequels) once every couple of years or so, and each time I do the novel's vision of the future seems that much more quaint, a retro-futurist cul-de-sac of "could have, but didn't." (Something Gibson himself has acknowledged in the intro to Virtual Light, a more up-to-date -- yet also dated -- novelistic spin on cyberpunk themes.) Oddly enough, the novel's increasingly dated vision of the shape of things to come is one of the major reasons I've become so fond of the book -- nostalgia for an anticipated future that never came to pass.

"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a large hand through close cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."

See, I thought "Screamin' Fist" was the a-side of The Viletones' 1977 debut 7"...

The Viletones - Screamin' Fist - Somewhere around here I have a 1978 issue of Creem which covers the Sex Pistols' American tour and subsequent break-up. One of the short news blurbs in the front of the magazine mentions The Viletones, specifically the announcement by the Canadian punk band's lead singer, Nazi Dog, that he planned to kill himself on stage during an upcoming show. I wonder how that worked out for him?

Rational Youth - City of Night (from Cold War Night Life, 1982) - The "punk" aspect of cyberpunk wasn't a musical reference so much as shorthand for the genre's street-level grittiness and its "underground" sensibility, which dovetailed into the popular perception of the 80's punk subculture.

My synesthetic soundtrack when reading cyperpunk fiction runs toward the New Romantic end of the spectrum, though I admit that "cybersynthpop" lacks a certain ring to it.