윤

I close my eyes and listen and it’s 1982 again, my Aiwa cassette player accompanies my once and only future through Memorial City Mall.

I’m still incredibly moved by this song.

What’s amusing about this whackjob is that his end-of-days formula acknowledges the 80’s synth-pop of Anthony Burgess’ Heaven 17 (I’m partial to “Lady Ice and Mr. Hex” myself), whose origin may indeed lie elsewhere.

Where’s a band like Midnight Oil when we need them? (2003)

Could be Peter Garrett is the marginalized Ralph Nader of Australia, the reaction the mention of one of my favorite bands got from a young LS mate down under, and who knows, in an alternate universe where they had more deservingly gone on to all the success U2 enjoys in ours, their message may have become the same commercialized crap. Still, Amazon got the sale when they finally marked down the price of their concert video (it said out of stock afterward, meaning the last one went to me—or better yet, other fans with whom I experienced a communion of mind) because his channeling Michael Berryman as some kind of electrified Frankenstein’s monster onstage was truly a highlight of my concert-going days. Could be I’ve missed out on stuff just as relevant in the interim yearsdecades, but to my knowledge no one’s put them quite as succinctly as, “The rich get richer/ The poor get the picture/The bombs never hit you when you’re down so low”.

It’s what they’ve started calling them in this blog, and it’s sadly true. I gripe less about the “animation”, of course, than the writing, and in fact one of my favorite frames from the show is a very zombie-like Homer:

Ironic then, that The Walking Dead should make it up to TV and not deserve the same head shot. It and Community (whose Halloween episode scored with yet more undead action) surely point to an epidemic of Korean-American actors where once Johnny Yune was all the talk for his appearance on the Love Boat.

Well into my 17th waking hour now, but enough of it remains for me to recall a television program being recorded before us among a live studio audience—or was it a new kind of club holding a Scrabble competition? At the bar, I informed my young family, were actors George Wendt (who I saw the other night without all the weight in My Bodyguard) and Rhea Perlman, reunited in Easter Egg roles. The favorites would lose with words ruled ineligible to a bespectacled girl revealed as the crowd dispersed. I lost track of 老婆 after she, in a hooded coat, took off with the boys, and fell in with others who spilled onto the night street. An Echo and the Bunnymen song was playing, but I’m not sure whether it was “Lips Like Sugar” or “Bring on the Dancing Horses”; I heard that Doors remake last week on First Wave in this, my last month with XM Radio. But like far too much Supertramp on The Sound LA, I can’t stand Sting outside the Police.

I’ve dreamed about them before, but this time I didn’t make it to any actual music. Or create any of my own. The daytime outdoor concert was just starting and presumably the band was prepping their appearance from behind a large white curtain on the stage. Drumming began as shadowy images were projected onto it, reminiscent of the puppetry in that Gong Li movie I stayed up late to get through a few weeks ago, and the sticks formed to spell out their name. The spiraling “E” in the center they couldn’t get right so it was obviously animated from a film; in fact, a montage of archival footage featuring each member performing took over the light show. Then the crowd’s attention was turned to a scene in the quiet countryside, where someone was having a spoken argument with his mother but to the same back-and-forth lyrics from “Uncontrollable Urge”.

While I’m doing the Devo, I might as well look up an old track that’s been at the back of my mind—in a box in the bottom of my storage, same difference—Mecha-Mania Boy, which, as I recall, came only on a nondescript 45 from Sound Warehouse. Back then the only repositories of subculture were those we carried around in our heads and compared only with kindred fans at record conventions, so coming across an off-album B-side was like discovering alternate-universe baseball cards. But even today there’s disagreement over whether the lyrics say “now he wants to know your little mistakes” (by far the more profligated version, copied and pasted complete with spelling error, and laughably transcribed) and “now he wants to know your unit’s name.” I liked it because it sounded like every other song on Freedom of Choice, yet maintained their trademark postmodern sensibility for that transition to New Traditionalists.

Hulu has them all, for free. Stupid Philistines, I was once willing to pay for them in laserdisc boxsets!

Wait long enough and everything will eventually be scanned or screencapped. And this from the same network the TV happened to be left on the digital tuner when I switched over from an increasingly pointless late-night EXP session. The episode was actually “Don’t Open Till Doomsday”, one before the ludicrous bee fantasy, but the teaser was sufficient to jog my memory of many an early morning spent in the colorless glow of the romance in them all. Telling of some historical perspective that I will always rate “The Man Who Was Never Born”, for example, over my own generation’s beloved Terminators (and Harlan Ellison claimed his stories had been ripped off), and found nothing yet—though alternate realities comes close—to get over the escapism of the “Fun and Games” concept.

Kids these days can’t fathom what life was like pre-‘net, when your choice (and taste) in music was limited to college radio and sparse import sections of dank record stores, movies and television from overseas likewise made it only if you showed your support during PBS fund drives—which seemed to keep Tom Baker around forever; alas, a good thing—I might otherwise have read about the original ’85 BBC serial on a blog, tried to sit through 10-minute installments on YouTube then had 老婆 torrent me a Chinese fansub. The Mel Gibson remake stands as a perfectly serviceable thriller, but even with eco-terrorism and corporate conspiracy practically being Netflix categories now, was it ever gutted! And by the same director? Makes me fear for his Green Lantern. The whole Gaia angle and the unrealized new age-y direction leave little doubt that this was way ahead of its Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go time, yet still too out there for audiences today.