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 4 - dangerous waters

I am the captain of a ghostly crew.
Sail the seven seas with nothing to do.
The girl that I thought was untrue...
...really loved me. Boo hoo hoo.
(Inspired by the Hoodoo Gurus' "Death Ship" from Stoneage Romeos, 1984)

study in scarlet

Happy birthday, Mr. Sims! I tried to get the Baroness, but she was already booked to appear at a John McCain fundraiser.

808 State - In Yer Face (from Ex:El, 1991) - Techno grooves that hit like unto a thing of iron...or a thrown car battery.

Lalo Schifrin - Main Titles (from the Enter the Dragon OST, 1973) - Facekicking it up old school.

Vacation 2008: Day 8 - Cruising attitude

Same as it ever was...
The Embarrassment - Sex Drive (from a 1980 single; collected on Heyday: 1979-1983, 1995) - Is it still an "obscurity" if it has already been posted by every punk rock blog on the internet? No matter, this cut by Witchita's finest is always worth a listen or three.

The Lookalikes - Can I Take You Home Tonight? (from a 1980 single) - In which some Irish powerpoppers try to get lucky. (It's a far classier approach than my high school friends used to use, but the Zubaz/white leather jacket/snakeskin boots/gold chains/Drakkar Noir ensemble isn't exactly a high bar to surpass.)

Vacation 2008: Day 3 - Give me fyah

Look what I got in the mail last Saturday!

The 25th anniversary edition of Barbecue, the G.I. Joe team's resident firefighter! Or more accurately, the G.I. Joe team's rezahdint fy-ah-fy-tah and token Bostonian.

Lady Jaye's file card states she was born in the Vineyard, but it's safe to assume that she was a high holiday baby with a permanent address in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Gabriel "Bahbahcue" Kelly, on the other hand, was the real fictional deal, a seventh generation Beantown jake presumably well versed in the local culture of fradulent disability reports and lack of independent oversight.

"I'd love tah help ya fight Cobra Cammandah, Duke, but my back's been actin' up. Union rules. Maybe when I get back from rock climbin' I can do somethin'."

While the general wisdom regarding special forces operatives stresses cross-training (so that the units can function effectively despite loss of individual members), the Joes were hyper-specialized to a fault, with full-time team members dedicated solely to covering even the most narrow of disciplines. In practice, this meant that many of the less well-rounded members of the team either spent most of their time warming the benches back at the Joes' HQ or got dragged along on missions outside their areas of expertise, leading to absurd scenarios like Snow Job, an arctic warfare expert, fighting in full cold weather gear in the tropics. Call it the "licensed merchandise theory of warfare."

For poor Barbecue -- armed with a hi-tech supersoaker and a fire axe -- the time not spent inspecting the base's smoke detectors and spinkler systems went something like this...


An important function, to be sure, but it doesn't dull the gnawing feelings of inadequacy when the other guys and gals on the team are doing some post-op boasting about how many Rattlers they shot down or how they kicked Destro in the 'nads while leaping from an exploding A.W.E. Striker.

In the overfondly remembered G.I. Joe cartoon series, Barbecue's great shining moment came in "The Viper Is Coming," a episode revolving around the title's ominous warning and culminating, as these things usually do, with an Eastern European gentleman arriving to "vipe the vindows."

Yes, for real. So fuck your rose-tinted childhood nostalgia, fanboys. All the perfumes in Araby can't mask the pungent stink of 80's toy cartoons.

The episode did treat the public, however, to another interesting popcult attempt to duplicate the Bay State's distinctive regional accent. It goes about as well as you'd expect, as demonstrated by this fan-edited trip into the poorly-synched mouth of madness...

Now while there are certain Snagglepussean overtones in the Charlestown variant of the Boston accent (which I suspect is the real reason behind the Townies' famous "Code of Silence"), I can state with a reasonable degree of authority that we do not speak like the "confirmed bachelor" character actor lovechild of Phil Silvers and Jack Haley. (Haley, along with Ray Bolger, did happen to hail from Beantown, but even so...)

(Also, I don't want to read too much into things, but the personality profile on Barbecue's file card states, and I quote, "He can...wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart Coke bottle." Fancy that.)

Dude, I know you're tired of "pahk the cah" jokes, but the white boy ebonics thing is not the answer.
For the musical portion of today's post, I decided to keep things nice and local...

The Cars - It's All I Can Do (from Candy-O, 1979) - As long as it's done well, I won't complain.

The Pixies - Dig for Fire (from Bossanova, 1990) - This is Boston, not Centralia. I still haven't warmed up to The Pixies, as the psychic scars inflicted by the various fans of the band are still tender after almost twenty years, though I can appreciate the music...in small doses...in the rare proper context.

and off they go

I was born in 1972, and my formative years were split between the self-asorbed malaise of the Me Decade and the superficial glitter of the Greed Decade. It was fun time to be a kid, as long as you discount the nuclear war anxiety, plaid chinos, Foreigner songs....

...and toy cartoons. Those fruits of the FCC's (at Reagan's behest) removal of restrictions on maximum advertising time allowed toy manufacturers to target their sales pitch to the tykes though program-length commercials posing as poorly-animated syndicated cartoon shows. Even as a kid, I thought they were pretty stupid and far tamer than what happened in actual backyard play sessions, though I did collect and play with some of the featured plastic gee-gaws.

G.I. Joe was a special favorite. Its superheroic presentation (with code names and colorful costumes) of ostensibly "real" military professions and hardware was an easy sell to a kid who was obsessed with comic books and dreamed of following in the footsteps of his war hero father. My brother and I didn't follow the script as laid out in the cartoon and licensed Marvel comic book series, but instead crafted our own (very derivative) characterizations and scenarios, which prefigured the role playing games that would supplant action figures as our hobby of choice.

All of my old figures, along with a lot of other popcult artifacts I'd sacrifice an eye to regain, were lost in the crazy period after my mother's death. My brother did hang on to, or rediscover, a handful of mostly-broken figures which rest in the hulk of a Cobra Terrordrome we pulled out of a neighbor's trash and which is now collecting dust in a corner of my grandma's attic.

I've purchased the occasional vintage or reissued figure or vehicle for reasons of nostalgia or lingering sentimental value, though I've generally avoided the totemic fetishization of childhood diversions that affects too many of my peers. I understand the allure of employing the disposable income of one's adult self to try to recapture (or to hold on to) the stuff of one's youth, but it's a path fraught with the risk of crossing over into dogma and obsession, long nights spent scanning eBay listings and arguing over minutae in discussion section of Optimus Prime's Wikpedia page.

Or worse, using facile references to Thundercats or The Inhumanoids as shorthand for real humor.

There is a certain sense of victory in scoring a coveted prize toy twenty-five years after the fact, but it's a hollow victory....unless you're talking about a set of these beauties.

Sick Of It All - G.I. Joe Headstomp (from Blood, Sweat, and No Tears, 1989) - "Headstomp?" Wasn't he the Joes' civil affairs and community relations specialist?

The Clash - Ivan Meets G.I. Joe (from Sandinista! 1980) - Revisionist rock historians be damned, there is only one word that effectively describes Sandinista!

That word is hubris.

Finally, no musical tribute to G.I. Joe would be complete without some Cold Slither...

I heard that Buzzer tried to get the original lineup together to play at this year's Crüe Fest. Zartan held out for too much money, however, so they decided to replace him with Ronnie James Dio for the tour.

Zartan & The Dreadnoks - Cold Slither - Obtained from here, which also has an alternate version and lyrics for the karaoke-minded.

reverts to pure female

In wake of the cultural and social upheavals of the 1960's, it became a common enough practice for popcult entertainments to acknowledge, if only grudgingly, the heightened awareness of egalitarian principles that permeated the era. Not surprisingly, this trend resulted in a number of stories where ostensibly laudable sentiments were presented (intentionally or not) in the most gratingly patronizing or condescending manner imaginable.

Which brings us to "The Powderpuff Run" from Hot Wheels #4 (September-October 1970). As the title suggests, the series was a licensed tie-in to Mattel's popular line of die-cast toy cars, which also spawned a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon series. "Short-lived" because it had the misfortune of airing at a time when the FCC actually had teeth in matters not directly related to "wardrobe failures" and has-been Irish rock stars uttering four letter words, and the cartoon was yanked when it ran afoul of the restrictions on advertising time. (Those restrictions would later be lifted during the Gipper's administration, thus paving the way for a flood of terrible, cheaply-produced toy cartoons and infomercials for questionable products. Yay, progress!)

The only thing that set the Hot Wheels comic apart from the mass of forgettable and forgotten kid's fare from that wild era when kids actually read non-manga comics was the participation of Alex Toth, whose outstanding powers of illustration were capable of elevating even the most pedestrian plot material. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Toth was not involved in crafting "The Powderpuff Run," which was a Len Wein/Ric Estrada collaborative effort. (Talented men both, and I won't fault anyone for not bringing their A-game to a short back up feature in a licensed toy comic, but I gotta call 'em as I see 'em...)

The story begins with the member of the Hot Wheels racing team puttering around the Metro City Speedway. When team member Ardeth (no relation to Bernadeth) asks why the team isn't planning to field an entrant to the women-only "Daisy Derby" event (because there is no vocation so dangerous or skill-intensive that it cannot be diminished with a girly descriptor when women are involved), tempers begin to flare...

DO IT, SISTER!
Before Ardeth can deliver Mickey's well-deserved braining, the arrival of a mysterious driver of exceptional ability captures the attention of the team. And guess what, she's a WOMAN!

Two women participants in an overwhelmingly male-dominated sport? Won't anyone think of the patriarchy?
She's not just any woman, either. She's Alexandra, cousin of the Hot Wheels Team's hated rival, Dexter Carter. Carter's gloating (coupled with his disturbingly misaligned nostrils) is too much for Mickey to take, and changes his mind about Ardeth's participation in the Daisy Derby...

Dexter Carter: The bastard child of Henry Mitchell and Oswald Cobblepot?
Supporting a colleague's dreams and career aspirations? Whatever. Winning a dick-waving contest by proxy? COUNT ME IN!

With little time to waste, the team members commence burning the midnight oil to kit out a suitable ride for Ardeth to use. Because they're aiming for performance over aesthetic appeal, the final product ends up looking a bit rough around the edges, so Ardeth and Janet, the Daphne Blake to Ardeth's Velma Dinkley, take it upon themselves to do a little impromptu customization...

Yeah, because there's an inherent sense of dignity in turning one's car into a rolling billboard for Viagra or chewing tobacco.
Is it an attempt to subvert traditional perceptions regarding gender? Or to unironically embrace them? The text is ambiguous on this point.

Race day arrives, and Ardeth discovers that winning might be a harder proposition than she had previously anticipated. Not only is Alexandra a skilled and aggressive driver, but she has also had her car outfitted by the same firm that does automotive customization work for Matt Helm and Penelope Pitstop. Even though she is in full view of thousands of (granted, mostly shitfaced) spectators, she doesn't think twice about employing these non-street legal modifications...

The principles of fluid dynamics worked differently back in the late 1960's.
As Ardeth struggles to regain the lead, Janet hatches a little scheme of her own to neutralize Alexandra's decisive advantages on the asphalt...

..and so the Anderson Family's weekend outing to the races ended in an explosion of flame and sheet metal. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested donations be made to the local Waffle House.
Other signs Janet had considered using included "Your attitude scares potential mates," "Work or family? You can't have it all," and "Your biological clock is ticking!"

Alexandra's fall to the inexorable forces of biological determinism leaves a clear path to the checkered flag for Ardeth, who nets the Daisy Derby Cup (which is just like the Metro City 500 Cup, but decorated with plastic flowers and pink ribbon and stuffed with a $25 certificate for a pedicure instead of a check for $5000) with no further complications.

Feeling empowered? I know I am. (Wait, I meant "confused and slightly queasy." I confuse those all the time.)

Nobody fucking cares what you think, Mickey.
The Bodysnatchers - Ruder Than You (from a 1980 single; collected on The 2-Tone Collection: A Checkered Past, 1993) - We named one of the local feral cats (the mother of Lil' Baby Setz and Nubby, and therefore the grandmother of our kittens) "Rude Girl," in reference to this song and The Clash's "Rudie Can't Fail." How's that for insular personal trivia?

As for the song, it's a swell bit of all-female 2-Tone ska. Singer Rhoda Dakar later went on to work with The Specials and other members of the band eventually formed the Belle Stars.

The Dictators - (I Live for) Cars and Girls (from The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! 1975) - An admirable philosophy, I suppose, providing the car in question isn't a 1985 AMC Eagle and the girl isn't Sally Kern.

I'll have one of those

I recently picked up the G.I. Joe 25th Anniversary two-pack featuring Tomax and Xamot, Cobra's resident Corsican twins and leaders of the elite Crimson Guard. Though my days of nerdy impulse purchases are largely behind me, I splurged on this particular pair of action figures in the spirit of brotherly bonding. My brother will get the Tomax figure and I'll hold on to the Xamot one (as we share the distinction of being the sibling with the facial scars).

Hey, it's cheaper and more sanitary than getting matching tattoos, all right?

While I was struggling to free the toys from their hermetically-sealed plastic sarcophagus, something on the back of the package caught me eye. It was an advertisement for a mail-in offer. The offer in itself wasn't remarkable, but rather its interestingly phrased title...

Unfortunate? Yes, but almost certainly unintentional, even given the country's ongoing slide into the reactionary grip of rampant militarism and social conservatism.

It got me to thinking, however, what role an "Operation: Rescue Doc" would play on the modern battlefield. Probably something similar to this...

(Your are free to choose whether to click or not.)
Were you aware that Snake Eyes was a dues-paying member of NARAL? Well, now you know, and as they say, knowing is half the battle.

Jello Biafra & Mojo Nixon - Will the Fetus Be Aborted? (from Prairie Home Invasion, 1994) - YEE-EFFING-HAH!

The Mekons - Born to Choose (from Born to Choose, 1993) - "Protect the unborn, beat on a whore" -- a succinct and accurate summation of the inherent paradox that underlies anti-choice ideology. A bit on the reductive side, you say? Probably, but guess what? I don't give a flying fuck when it comes to those bigoted, hypocritical zealots. They can wallow in the stink of their own twisted dogma till even the flies drop dead from disgust, but they have no business dictating matters of public health or making individual personal decisions for the rest of us.

deep scarred for life

My appointment with the endodontist is at Tuesday at 11:00 AM, which means, Providence willing, that everything should be sorted out by this time tomorrow. Curiously enough, I'm not feeling the usual sense of dread that accompanies such events, only a feeling of weary resignation coupled with inexplicably having "Philadelphia Freedom" stuck looping inside my head. Very unsettling, indeed.

One 1970's nightmare deserves another, so today's minimal content post features a 1972 advertisement for the Blythe doll. Poorly received upon its debut, the hyperencephalic Keanesian homunculus with color-changing saucer eyes has since gone on to become a prized totem among both doll collectors and camp-addicted hipsters. The dolls also have a large fan following in Japan, which, given that nation's well-noted fascination with the hellish zone where adorability and terror overlap, should surprise no one.

(click to induce a larger mental trauma)
Blyth Power - God Has Gone Wrong Again (from the 1985 "Chevy Chase" single) - No kidding. At least these anarcho-folk punkers are there to put things right.

His Name Is Alive - Her Eyes Were Huge Things (from Home Is in Your Head, 1991) - More of an ethereal interlude (from a 4AD band? The Devil, you say!) than a complete track unto itself, but the title was too perfect to pass up.

no one teaches you how to live

The Raincoats - Fairytale in the Supermarket (from The Raincoats, 1980) - Don't count on others to write a happy ending for you.

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.

visual synergy: meet the press

Wait, there's a war going on in Iraq? I was too busy watching Bill O'Reilly discuss the cultural significance of "Firecrotch." This a brave new age of journalism, brothers and sisters! Deboned, defanged, and with record levels of cross-promotion! Why not segue from a report on new prosthetics for war amputees, complete with footage of the new Bionic Woman series, to a Big Pharma-sponsored health report on the dangers of EEBPS -- Excessive Eye Booger Production Syndrome -- and how you can ask your doctor about Sleepiseedimox to cure it? (Side effects may include diarrhea, eye rot, or excessive production of eye boogers.)

Others may lament this sorry state of affairs, but not I. I get my news from music videos.


Ice T - Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous - "Mr. Ice? What was it like working with Judd Nelson and Richard Belzer? Do you still have 'your twelve gauge sawed off'? Any word of a Body Count reunion tour?"


The Tubes - Talk To Ya Later - Suddenly I'm feeling a strange urge to fire up the Atari 2600 and play some Megamania.


Don Johnson - Heartbeat - Here we see an actor pretending to be a musician pretending to be a reporter pretending that The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart never happened.


Adam Ant - Goody Two Shoes - A music video classic featuring the familiar (and portentously tragic) Antean theme of persecution, as well as an appearance by Bond Girl/scream queen Caroline Munro as the female reporter sporting the insanely huge pair of spectacles.


Naked Eyes - Always Something There to Remind Me - "Switched on Bacharach" or "Soft Cell minus the sleaze," if you will.

For me, this song is a most potent nostalgia-inducing totem, its synthesized bell peals are capable of evoking a flood of half forgotten childhood memories, including the location of the AT-AT Driver action figure I misplaced when I was eleven. I'd stop by North Woburn and retrieve the poor thing, but the tree stump I hid it under has been cleared away to make room for a massive subdivision.

Naked Eyes - Always Something There to Remind Me (from Burning Bridges, 1983; also available on The Best of Naked Eyes, 1991)

morituri te salutant

"Look what I got at Target today! Let's play!"

"Okay."

"I'm Bob. I'm a Roman centurion. I have a sword."

"I am Vectrix, son of Verucloetius, and was once a reknowned tinsmith of the Volcae. When the Golden Eagles came to take our lands, I rallied to the banner of my chieftain. Our warhost was slaughtered by Centurion Bob's legion. I saw my wife and daughters spitted on Roman spears, and I was taken prisoner. My arms were strong from working my trade, so I was judged fit to join the gladitorial games as a slave. My days are spent sating my Imperial masters' lust for bloodsport. My nights are spent mourning for my family and my tribe, and I await the day I shall join them in the world beyond this one."

"So, Vectrix, do you wanna fight?"

"........................................................

..........................................................

Sure, why not?"

Human League - Circus of Death (from Reproduction, 1979) - As part of its new line of Roman and gladiator-themed toys, Playmobil is also releasing an Emperor figure (with throne) and a giant Circus Maximus playset. I'm half tempted to pick it up, if only to incorporate it with my Playmobil nativity scene.

The song? Oh, it's from the League's creepy, experimental days, as opposed to their coldly romantic new wave era, or their lousy MOR pop nonsense period.

The Jesus Lizard - Gladiator (from Liar, 1992) - In college, my friends and I used The Jesus Lizard as a means of describing certain...eccentrics...to be tiptoed around. For example:

"What's his deal?"
"Oh, he's a big fan of The Jesus Lizard."
"That explains it. Thanks for the warning."

couldn’t understand a thing they said

The synergetic entertainment/marketing blockbuster that is the Transformers movie opens today. While I have no desire to submit myself to a widescreen assault of Michael Bay-isms and blatant product placements, the film’s premiere does present me with the opportunity to spotlight my affection for the gloriousness that is Cosmos.

I was twelve years old when the first generation of Transformers debuted in the States, which meant I was old enough to achieve escape velocity from the multimedia hard sell surrounding the toy line. Though I didn’t care about the ready-made Transformers mythos, which seemed rather puerile even from a kid’s eye level, I was fascinated by the sleek, angular designs of the toys themselves which dovetailed nicely with my growing appreciation of giant robo anime (where many of the early Transformers designs were “borrowed” from). I was especially fond of the Mini-Bot figures at the low end of the line’s price range, which combined affordability with an inspired sense of oddness, and none were as delightfully odd as Cosmos.

The extremely retro flying saucer vehicle mode…

…the awkward-looking (Maura says “absurd”) robot mode…

…and the garish red, green, and yellow color scheme that evokes both an Eastern Bloc design aesthetic and a commitment to pan-Africanism… What’s not to love? It’s as if some cheapjack Japanese toy from the early 1960’s managed to sneak its way into a hip, happening American franchise of the mid-1980’s, and I can totally get behind that concept (being somewhat unstuck in time myself).

When I went of a vintage robot toy buying spree in the late 1990’s, Cosmos was at the top of my wish list. (My original toy had gotten lost, along with most of my childhood junk, during the Great Upheaval of 1988.) The replacement version now occupies a place of honor on my computer desk, and it occasionally moonlights as a kicky chapeau for Oscar the Pughuahua.

Concept sketches for a deluxe edition update of Cosmos were displayed at Botcon (an event I envision resembling the circle of hell reserved for thirty-something victims of arrested childhood), but the newfangled designs lacked the simple appeal of the original’s and resembled a cross between a paramilitary Frisbee and a next-gen anti-personnel mine. (I still would have bought one, though.)

Billy Lee Riley and His Little Green Men – Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll (from Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley, 1999) - Take me to your juke joint, earthman. I feel the urge to wail on my space-sax. Update: Because I was behind in my blog reading, I didn't realize that AM, Then FM posted Sleepy LaBeef's excellent 1979 cover of this song on July 1st. Great minds think alike, yadda yadda and so forth.

Violent Femmes – Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah (Means I Love You) (from Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, 1995) - Jet Screamer! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

no batteries, no tracks

The financial juggling required by homeownership has put the kibosh on such frivolities, but before adult responsibilities choked off my disposable income in the fall of 2004, eBay and I had quite the torrid love affair going on. I bought a number of cool items through the auction site; it was an invaluable resource for tracking down various popcult artifacts that I had either missed out on in the past or had once owned and lost to the sands of time.

Some of my more memorable purchases included:

- various punk and new wave records that I was never able to locate in the local used vinyl shops, such as UK Decay’s singles, the UXA album, Bonnie Hayes and the Wild Combo’s Good Clean Fun, plus band-related promotional posters and other materials.

- a Pakistani “katana,” which is little more than a 30” razor-sharp meat cleaver. I’m not one of those guys who gets all hot and bothered over weaponry, but I always wanted to own a real, honest-to-gosh sword, and the price was right. (Under $25, if I remember correctly.) My wife gets extremely uncomfortable around it, so it’s currently buried somewhere in the back of the bedroom closet.

- several G1 Transformers toys. Most, if not all of these, were repurchases of toys lost in the great upheaval of 1988 (following my mother’s death). Though the Transformers mythos always struck me as puerile (even when I was a kid), I have an immense love for Japanese robot toys.

- an original animation cel from Akai Koudan Zillion featuring Apple in an evening dress. It cost me all of eight bucks, including shipping. I know there are scammers passing off repro cels as originals and selling them on eBay currently, but I’m almost certain the cel I purchased is the real deal. It was a case of some anime retailer doing inventory and thinking “Who the hell is going to buy a cel from a generally hated series? Dump it on eBay and see who bites.”

I was never able, however, to get my hands on the one childhood artifact I really, really desired, a relatively complete, working SSP Smash-Up Derby car with a ripcord. Damn, those were fine toys. The noise the gyro-wheel made as the car screamed across the maroon linoleum floor of the dining room of the North Woburn apartment… My mother’s cats running for cover as it slammed into the baseboard and sent bits of snap-on plastic shrapnel flying… Oh, to be able to relive those moments with a new generation of household pets. That’s about as near as I get to a pre-midlife crisis.

The problem is that we’re talking about a thirty year old toy designed to crash into things and fall apart on impact, and vintage toy sellers happy to reap extortionate amounts of money from thirty-something nostalgia addicts with more cash than sense. As much as the desire to recapture a bit of that old childhood magic burns in my breast, I could never justify the cost outlay required to attain my holy grail, even when I had disposable income a’plenty.

Even after scaling back my ambitions to more attainable levels – a working non-Smash Up Derby SSP car (with ripcord) that didn’t look like it spent two decades buried in a sandbox – my dream still remains unfulfilled.

Basement Jaxx - Supersonic (from Kish Kash, 2003)

Spandau Ballet - Toys (from Journeys to Glory, 1981)

808 State - Crash (from 808:88:98, 1998)