a stray thread of memory

UMass Boston is situated on Columbia Point, an artificially-augmented peninsula jutting out into the Dorchester Bay side of Boston Harbor, which means that my alma mater offers an amazing ringside view whenever a storm rolls in off the Atlantic. During major meteorological events, the storm surge can be strong enough to swamp parts of Morrissey Boulevard, forcing a closure of the road and sometimes even the campus itself.

That's what happened on October 30, 1991, when the Halloween Nor'easter (a.k.a. the "No Name Storm" a.k.a. the "Perfect Storm") slammed into the New England coastline. Up in the windowless clubrooms and offices on the fourth floor of Wheatley Hall, my small group of friends and I had no idea of what was going down until someone stopped by to tell us that Morrissey was closed off, and that we'd better skedaddle before things got any worse.

My girlfriend at the time and I, along with two of our friends, hopped on the shuttle bus to the JFK/UMass subway station. We made it as far as the Bank of Boston offices on the corner of Mt. Vernon Street before the gridlock, which stretched up and around the Day Boulevard rotary and back through the South Boston waterfront, became so impenetrable that the bus driver opened the doors and told us to walk the rest of the way to the subway station.

The rain hadn't started yet, but the wind off the ocean had already reached gale force levels, forcing us to crab-walk the last couple of blocks to the station. The northbound Red Line train was empty, save for my group, a middle-aged townie, and a twitchy street person. At some point during the long, stop-and-go stretch between Broadway and South Station, the street person stumbled over to the doors of the car and started to pound on them with his fists.

Then he unzipped his fly and pissed on the floor of the car, howling "God forgive me" over and over as the puddle of urine spread beneath him. Eventually the townie looked up from his copy of the Herald and barked "Yer forgiven! NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

A group of yuppies got on the train when we finally arrived at South Station. They stood in a group by the doors, their designer shoes smack dab in the middle of Piss Lake. "Hey, someone must have spilled something!" one said, the the rest of the completely oblivious group chuckled at the non-joke. I suppose I could have clued them in, but it was too entertaining a spectacle to spoil.

My girlfriend lived in Jamaica Plain, so I saw her off at the southbound Orange Line platform before catching a another northbound Red Line train to Alewife. Even though it was mid-afternoon and Downtown Crossing is a major public transit hub, the place was a ghost town. Even the street musicians and the folks who sold incense and Afrocentric pamphlets by the shuttered snack bar had packed it in and called it a day.

And I thought to myself, as I attempted (and failed) to sit on one of the platform's non-functional granite seat-sculptures, that this is how the end of the world will probably feel like.

(I also had no idea that thirteen years later to the day, on another stormy afternoon, I'd be exchanging marriage vows with a girlfriend-yet-to-be.)

As for the musical annotations, here's a double shot of postpunk, my genre of choice in the autumn of 1991....and for every autumn since then. The chill in the air and the ever-lengthening evenings add the right touch of environmental synergy for appreciating coldly minimalist soundscapes, don't you think?

Cabaret Voltaire - Premonition (from The Voice of America, 1980)

Joy Division - Shadowplay (from Unknown Pleasures, 1979)

(More Red Line inspired hijinx here.)

Vacation 2008: Epilogue - Just a matter of time

RIDE TOGETHER, DIE TOGETHER.
...and just like that, it's all over.

It's not like I didn't accomplish anything during this past week or so. I built a compost bin. I finally managed to get the patio table out of the basement and onto the patio. I bought a ton of retro-junk that will almost certainly figure into upcoming posts. I got to enjoy New England's first monsoon season (not that Al Gore is right about global warming or anything) from the comfort and safety of my home in the Woburn Highlands.

As bad as playing catch-up as work will be, it's nothing I haven't handled a dozen times before, yet I still can't shake the feeling that my stay of execution is about to elapse. Does the condemned have any last requests? Yes, dispense with the last meal and bring me some fine, fine L.A. power pop to comfort me in my indolence's dying hours...

The Plimsouls - Zero Hour (from The Plimsouls, 1981)

Vacation 2008: Interlude - Don't need a weatherman

Don't mind me, I'm just taking a few minutes to calibrate this nifty piece of equipment (copped from Chris Sims) towards the prevailing local conditions:


Pylon - Cool (from Gyrate, 1980) - A bracing blast of postpunk relief. How is it that so many current bands have been slapped with the "postpunk" tag (or have self-applied the same), yet none of them even remotely capture those certain qualities that made old school postpunk so fascinating?

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.

no ice in your lovers walk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good times, indeed.

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

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

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

I trust the weather

It's insanely cold and windy outside and I'm suffering through some kind of bug that makes me feel as if my sinuses and larynx have been flossed with steel wool. Normally that would have been enough for me to call it a day and crawl back into bed, but the office holiday party is being held today and the wife needed me to haul our comestible contributions into work.

While I zone out over a small plate of BBQ kielbasa and Mexican dip, please consider this modest musical offering in lieu of actual content from me on this day:

Throwing Muses - Colder (from House Tornado, 1988) - House Tornado was the first Muses album I purchased (along with The Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God, at the long gone Strawberries store on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington), and it still sounds as esoteric and bizarre today as it did twenty years ago.

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.

come on down to the devil’s armpit

I spent most of the morning and early afternoon trying to complete my list of Saturday chores, an endeavor made much more difficult by atmospheric conditions I can only describe as gross. I don’t know what the heck has been going on with the weather these past few days. The temperature hasn’t been too oppressive, but the levels of humidity in the air have been obscene. Even the smallest physical exertions have become exercises in stickiness (and stinkiness), and it has conspired with the record high pollen levels to maintain a steady, low level sinus headache pulsing behind my eyes.

My cats have the right idea for dealing with the current conditions. The entire brood has been stretched out and sprawled out around the house like so many clocks in a Dali painting for most of the day. I’ve been alternating between naps in the air conditioned bedroom and perspiration-heavy bouts of scrubbing, sweeping, and polishing, all the while keeping an eye on what’s shaking meteorologically. From yesterday afternoon through the present time, there’ve been hints of an incoming front, but apart from some scattered showers and distant rumbles of thunder, no real relief has materialized. It currently feels like the barometric pressure has dropped a bit, but it could just be Mother Nature toying around with my expectations again.

The experience has got me to thinking about my middle teens, when, hell or high water, I would embark on a bike trip to the comic shop in Stoneham every Saturday to pick up the new releases. Rain, lightning, high winds, blinding migraines, or that one time I slipped off the seat and crushed my jewels on the crossbar – nothing could prevent me from making the six mile round trip to find out what was going to happen in the next issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Now I can’t even be bothered to do an internet search to find a synopsis of the current hot event title, much less rally myself in pursuit of some free stuff. Oh, how those fires of youthful enthusiasm have dimmed…

The March Violets – Steam (from Natural History, 1984; collected on The Botanic Verses, 2001) – Higlander wrote about the Violets a couple months back and provided some nice links for those interested in this rather underappreciated (in the U.S.) band. Non-goth enthusiasts might remember the name of the band from the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack, to which they contributed a baffling cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss Amanda Jones.”

Camper Van Beethoven – The Humid Press of Days (from Key Lime Pie, 1989) – Do you remember college rock radio? I remember the marketing push for this album on its release – the posters, the t-shirts, the endless repeat plays on music store soundsystems – but I was too busy buying lousy hardcore albums to care.

Hey, look at that! Tornado warnings in the next county over! Mother Nature, you're so naughty...

look to your soul and open your mind

It’s been a pretty gross day today. Between the heat, the humidity, the high pollen count, and the hellish commute home, I’m fairly well wrecked.

Instead of trying and failing to come up with a coherent post for today, I’m just going to pop open a can of Dr. Pepper and join Marmy Marmelstein, the twenty-pound feral cat who hangs out around our house, on the patio and watch the sun set through the trees down back.

Feel free to join me in spirit, unless you feel like trying to find the house in the maze of streets that crisscross the hillside. It also doesn’t help that there’s an almost identically named street running two blocks parallel to ours. It makes getting pizza deliveries a blast. (By “blast,” I mean “an extended exercise in frustration and ice cold congealed fat and cheese.”)

Tommy James and the Shondells – Crystal Blue Persuasion (from a 1969 single, collected on The Very Best Of Tommy James & The Shondells, 1993) – It doesn’t hold a candle to “Crimson and Clover” (which I consider to be the pinnacle of 60’s pop perfection), but makes for some great warm weather lounging music.

grown accustomed to the daily grind

Spring has arrived!

Up here in New England, it means that we only have to suffer through one or two more surprise snowstorms before the traditional six weeks of rain segue into a three month long heat wave. The five or six non-consecutive gorgeous spring days in between make it all worth it, however. Moderation is important, lest the joys of balmy weather make us forget our hard-won regional survival skills. Imagine the chaos that would result if folks round these parts suddenly began to use turn signals or were to strike up friendly conversations with strangers instead of giving them the customary wary look.

There’s still snow from last weekend’s storm on the ground at the moment, although it appears to be melting rapidly, but I did see a couple of robins bob-bob-bobbin’ along in our backyard this morning. It won’t really feel like spring until the cherry tree on our patio starts to blossom. Eventually its roots are going to take out the retaining wall and the whole tree will come crashing down the hill, but the view from the kitchen window while the tree is in bloom is simply breathtaking.

The Lemon Drops – I Live in the Springtime (from the Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era box set, 1998) – Psychedelic flavor, garage rock production.

Slow Children – Spring in Fialta (from Slow Children, 1981) – Nabokov gets a new wave makeover.

Finally, I leave you with the MST3K version of an educational film created to combat the rampant anti-springitism prevalent in 1940’s America. (Ok, it’s about the object by that name and not the season, but who cares? It’s got Coily the Spring Sprite!)

is there anyone prepared to tell me why

It was a balmy 70 degrees today in our little suburb northwest of Boston. My wife opened up some windows to let the fresh air in, and I started sweating from the heat while working though my weekend chores, even though I was only wearing jeans and a t-shirt. It was preferable to digging out from under a January blizzard, but it just didn’t feel natural.

A ferocious wind picked up after the sun sank behind the western hills. I was out on the patio just prior to writing this, watching the silhouettes of the trees behind our back fence twist and sway violently against the violet backdrop of the twilight sky. I could hear the dry bone rattles and snaps of their branches even above the howl of the wind. It was muy creepy, and I’m thankful that none of the trees are within falling distance of our house.

(The winds have died down completely since I began typing this, adding another layer of disturbing unreality to this day's meteorological antics.)

Pylon – Weather Radio (from Gyrate, 1980) – A nice bit of instrumental postpunk out of the legendary Athens, GA scene. It’s sad that Pylon’s material is out of print and largely forgotten while R.E.M. went on to become (boring and overrated) college rock legends. (Am I being too harsh again? You try spending a semester in a drawing class where the instructor, an MBA student slumming for supplemental income, accompanies each ninety-minute class session with the Out of Time album on repeat. Yes, R.E.M. is directly responsible for killing my desire to draw.)

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry – Talk About the Weather (from Talk About the Weather, 1985) – A latecomer to the postpunk party, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry sound is an odd convergence of influences. Traces of gothic rock, indie gloom, and an embryonic from of goth metal swirl around in the mix, as if some mid-80’s art student distilled one of her ninety-minute mix tapes into a single four-minute song.

Crass – Dry Weather (from Penis Envy, 1981) – Penis Envy, the Crass album even Grandma enjoys! I kid, but it seems like every time Crass comes up in a conversation, that album is the only work by Crass that people say they’ve listened to. It makes sense, I suppose, since it is about as close as the band ever got to a “poppier” sound, relatively speaking.

The Radiators – Let’s Talk About the Weather (from Ghostown, 1979) – Also known as The Radiators From Space, this early Irish punk band included future Pogue Phillip Chevron. This track is from their second and (until their 2004 reunion) final album, where the band put aside ther punky roots in favor of a mellower, melodic power pop sound.