In the Dark

There are (as has often been observed) two kinds of people in this world. What those two kinds are — well, that’s a matter of personal interpretation. Myself, I tend to divide the population into larks and owls.
To wit: Some of us, maybe most of us, live in the daylight — the early risers, the good people, who live in the daylight and greet the morning with a song. But there are some of us who burn the midnight lamp; the night hawks, who have prowled the infomercial wasteland of the TV graveyard shift, who know the eerie hush of 3:00 AM, who crawl the streets sleepless in the small hours, in the liminal zone between yesterday and tomorrow, moving through pools of lamplight when the pavements are strange and lonely in the dark. The Night People.

For the tribes of the night, Halloween is our Mardi Gras, our Christmas, and our Thanksgiving, all rolled into one. It’s our tourist season, when we natives of the interzone play host to the bright-eyed Day People giddily clutching their 12-hour passes. It’s party time, in other words — an opportunity to share our freaky glamour with our brothers and sisters from the sunny side. And it is an all-night affair, for the walls between this world and the next grow thin only with the coming of dusk.


Read the rest (and hear twelve hours of Halloween mixtapes!) at Popdose. This one was a labor of love.

Glutton For Punishment

Back for the New Year, it's PopSmarts all over again, this time taking a look at the history of gimmickry in film — and the underlying idea of cinema as an incomplete artform. Featuring William Castle, Professor Layton, Madeleine Kahn, and Smell-O-Vision!

Every Yuletide Carol Needs a Troll

Dropping a turd in your holiday punchbowl, PopSmarts is back to kick it old-school — 1834-style in fact, as we take a look at the historical legislation that prompted the writing of A Christmas Carol, and how the assumptions behind those laws are still relevant in our own more-enlightened time.

It's a long read, but if you retain only a single line of it, let it be this one:

The stone truth is that people on government assistance earn every goddam penny.

Come for the history lesson; stay for the outrage!

Wake the Snake

The new Popdose Conceptual Theater of the Airwaves has gone live — an eighty-minute-plus seamless MP3 mix curated by yours truly, free for download, featuring an imaginary soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. With PJ Harvey, the Smiths, Imogen Heap, Judas Priest, and the Kronos Quartet, plus rare (-ish) tracks from Daniel Johnston, Alan Moore, Television Personalities, and the colloquial many more. 

But I Know What I Am

Sometimes a song expresses your political beliefs; sometimes it helps you to form them. This time around at PopSmarts, a personal reflection on identity, presentation, and the hunger for authenticity, and how even a jokey song can exercise a profound effect.

Bonehead

This time, PopSmarts thinks wa-a-a-ay too hard about management theory and decision-making bias as they apply to casual gaming, as I subject a prime slice of mid-90s shareware to far more thorough consideration than its own creator ever did.

Dig the Streets of Life! Dig the Chinamen!

To pay dubious honor to the centenary of Fu Manchu, PopSmarts considers one of the best-loved but seldom-seen comicbooks of the Marvel Age, Master of Kung Fu — and the ways in which it both depended upon and interrogated racial stereotypes.

Set aside some time for this one. At 3,500 words, and with a boatload of images, it’s exactly the sort of in-depth pop-culture delve that my sainted editor Jeff Giles was asking for when he greenlit this column, the poor dope. He asked for it, and now he’s getting it, good and hard.

And for no particular reason but that I love you, here’s a bonus panel of Shang-Chi straight-up karate-chopping a goddamned alligator:

(from Master of Kung Fu #23, art by Al Milgrom and Klaus Janson)

S-M-R-T

Ever watch a movie that everyone raves about as being super-clever and hard-to-follow, but you followed it quite easily? Me neither — until this week. This time in PopSmarts, find out what makes me think I’m so goddam smart anyway.

Don’t Give a Damn About a Greenback Dollar

The annual Popdose Labor Day Mix for 2013 is now live, with a selection of work songs and economic rabble-rousing hand-selected by yours truly, all in one seamless hour-plus-long MP3. Features hard-to-find recordings and remixes from Kilby Snow, Devo, Shaking Family, MIA, Johnny Clegg, and the Raymond Scott Quintette, plus a homebrewed Jethro Tull track that you won’t hear anywhere else. That’s a promise.

No Sell Out

The worst sin in Hollywood is not to make a movie that people dislike; it’s to make a movie that they don’t understand. A British cult classic shows us how to entertain an audience without dumbing down, in this installment of PopSmarts.

I Didn’t Know It Even Had Words

Before it was a dance, it was a song. In this installment of PopSmarts, some thoughts on “Macarena,” twenty years after its original release. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder why anybody ever thought it was a good idea to play this at a wedding.

Defining the Definitive

In which I pursue the fool’s errand of trying to extrapolate a meaningful aesthetic theory from superhero comics — specifically, early-1980s Marvel.

I contend that if there was ever a time and place in commercial comics storytelling where you could smell the cordite from the medium’s shotgun marriage of art and commerce, it was the Paul Smith X-Men.

See me lay out my argument — and maybe start another one — in this installment of PopSmarts.

With Apologies to Rob Schneider

Pop stars are just like all other writers, in that you can usually tell who they’ve been reading by the way they’ve been writing — that is, the ones who read at all. This week’s PopSmarts takes a look at the bookshelf of the most ostentatiously well-read rocker of ‘em all.

For the record, there was a picture that I wanted to include — a hilarious promotional poster for the American Library Association, featuring Sting, costumed for his role as Dr. Frankenstein in The Bride in self-important Byronic blouse and greatcoat, golden locks a-flopping, backdropped by picturesque ruins — but although the sight is branded into my memory, I could not find a decent image of it online.

All that aside, the header image — a photo-détournement that I threw together in about three minutes — is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done.

Follow the Recipe for Licorice Pizza

New article up at Popdose. It’s a listicle, so consider it my audition piece for Buzzfeed, I guess?

Every year, Record Store Day brings us new musical releases to surprise and delight. One of the most delightful surprises this year was a live recording by onetime Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, performing Can’s 1973 album Ege Bamyasi in its entirety. It wasn’t an entirely unexpected move for Malkmus — he has long spoken of his love for the German experimental scene, and Can in particular — but still, it led us to wonder: When did this become a thing? ....

It’s a relatively recent innovation for one act to roll tape and recreate another act’s album start to finish. (Malkmus breaks slightly from tradition by performing Ege Bamyasi’s tracks out of their original sequence.) That noted musical omnivore Beck has made it something of a hobby, establishing a side project called the Record Club for that very purpose; but for most groups that turn their hand to it, the full-album cover is a one-off, even a holiday. Here are our picks for five of the best — and strangest — single-artist full-album covers.

The funny thing is that I’ve been acquainted with the music editor of Buzzfeed for years, and he’s still producing and facilitating the same level of smart coverage and analysis that he has ever done, even as he serves the site’s need for clickbait. He’s navigating a very fine line, and doing it far more skillfully than ever I could.

It may have something to do with the difference in our ages — he’s a digital native, while I am a naturalized citizen. And no matter how enthusiastically I may wave the flag, I’m always going to speak the language with an accent. 

The Trouble With Classicists

The PopSmarts column continues its mission of yoking together culture both academic and popular, with an installment exploring the intersection of highbrow classics, Stephen King, and The Simpsons Movie. Your English Lit professor would call it a “motif,” kids.

It’s that old semantic versatility again, basically. It’s the Democracy of Ideas. When there’s a good hook or a resonant symbol, everybody wants to play with it, whether or not they have the stamp of approval from the Great English Departments of America.

And the dirty secret is that the academic outsiders — the cartoonists, the pulp hacks, the grindhouse movie makers — might be the ones to find new meanings in the device, simply because they haven’t had the “right” meanings beaten into their heads so many times.

John Cale once sang, channeling Andy Warhol:

I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school;
I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool.

Truer words. Especially since it’s bound to happen at some point; so why be afraid of it?

Hitting An All-Time Low

This week at Popdose, the Like, Omigod! Digging Through the ‘80s Pop Culture Box series — an epic trawl through the seven-disc set from Rhino — reaches its halfway point. Now, it’s no secret that I’ve had a lead role on this project. The columns are in a round-table format, and are credited to the staff collectively, but I’ve been taking point on these pieces.

In fact, I can now reveal that Jon Cummings, Dw. Dunphy, and Dave Lifton have no independent existence, and that they are in fact pseudonyms that I have been employing for years. (I’m still not sure about Dan Wiencek. Sometimes I think he’s real, but I might have made him up, too, and then forgotten about him.)

Well, no. But I have been doing the work of compiling and formatting the discourse, which take place via an email list — taking a series of monologues and stitching them into something that resembles an actual conversation. Some of the hard work is done in the email threads themselves, shaping the flow and direction of the conversation as it happens, but a lot of it is done afterward, in the edits. Minor stuff, mostly. I find that creating a conversational flow is less about what gets said, and more about placement; tweaks to play up callbacks to earlier comments, positioning interjections and interruptions, inserting running jokes and leading questions.

I’ve always got a lot to say — no surprise there — but I try not to dominate the discourse. Which is why, at the last minute, I ended up cutting a long chunk from this week’s discussion of “Major Tom (Coming Home).” I want to run it here, though; in part because if I didn’t run it somewhere, I would be second-guessing myself — Did I really cut this for space, or because it made me uncomfortable to put it out there? — and in part because I still think it’s hilariously wrong-headed. And 100% true.

Holy mackerel, you guys, I’ve been doing this critic bullshit for a long time. I kept a journal when I was a teenager, and I dimly remembered writing something about this song; I thought the notebook must be long gone, but no — I just found it in a box in the basement, having survived thirty years and six times moving house. Let’s have a look...

Oh, God. I actually write about it as the capstone of The Major Tom Trilogy. 700+ words. I just typed it all out and I think my eyes are bleeding, and I can’t feel my legs. Guys, are you still there? I feel cold... so very cold...

The name of Major Tom is well-known to hard-core David Bowie connoisseurs, and now to fans of “New Music.” The unfortunate astronaut was Bowie’s first “persona,” the subject of his first success in 1969. before the Thin White Duke, before the Man who Sold the World — even before Ziggy Stardust — there was Major Tom.

….Although the first two chronicles of the luckless spaceman were created entirely by Bowie, and haven’t been played on mainstream radio for years, the third and most recent was conceived independently of Bowie’s guidance and approval, and can be heard by any casual listener to “New Music.” The song is “Major Tom (Coming Home),” and it was created by a German named Peter Schilling. It recounts the events of “Space Oddity,” but is an incredible leap from it stylistically. Whereas Bowie’s trip is a rambling composition, held together by wild guitar as spacey as its subject, Schilling’s version is a tight rhythmic package, a nervous, twangy high-speed musical piece. It hums with synthesizers. Its deft, terse lyrics are delivered with a cockeyed nervous energy that swells towards the end into a glorious release — but when the release comes it is not in a rush of pent-up violence, but in a beautiful promise of peace.

....Schilling, though working with an established subject, has made his work more touching than the original: his viewpoint lets us get into Major Tom’s head, and to sympathize with him. He doubts his mission: “Starting to collect requested data / What will it effect, when all is done? / thinks Major Tom.” Bowie’s cerebral detached viewpoint stresses the alienation of humans in space, but Schilling remembers that it is humans in space.

....“Major Tom (Coming Home)” is gloriously triumphant, while “Space Oddity” is ultimately depressing. Let’s face it, you’d rather hear about becoming more than human than about deep-space death, thus, Schilling’s piece is that rarity of rarities: the remake better than the original.

...

You know, if I had a spaceship, I would fly it faster than the speed of light, just so I could go back in time and punch my teenaged self right in the fucking face.

And that’s that. Just be grateful that I spared you all my utterly clueless “interpretation” of “Ashes To Ashes.” There’s a lot I’ll do for a laugh, but I still have some sense of shame.

In the meantime, rejoice in the news that Lego has released a David Bowie minifig. At least, I'm pretending it's Bowie.

Finally On Our Own

My latest PopSmarts column is live at Popdose. This was a tough one to write; the facts on the ground were obvious enough, but context and tone were very important for this.

Then I had to go and ruin everything by Photoshopping a Devo "energy dome" onto John Filo's famous photo of Mary Ann Vecchio. I'm a horrible person, really.