It’s hard to overstate the effect upon our psyches of things we’re exposed to when we are young and impressionable. For better or worse, these things stay with us forever and if we’re lucky these things are also of enduring quality and mystery. Such is the case with myself and the little known band Monitor, whose sole 7” single I chanced upon at Slipped Disc record store in Sepulveda, CA around 1980. I was already at this time quite the ardent Devo fan and I could tell they too had vaguely similar aesthetics, especially in Steve Thompsen’s virtuoso synth manglings. So enchanted was I with this lil’ slab o’ vinyl that I tracked them down and started hanging around with them and sneaking into all of their shows. That I soon found out they attended the same high school as I, 10 years earlier, only deepened my affection for them. As it happened they were just preparing to release their one and only self-titled LP which while retaining its electronic foundations revealed a darker, more psychedelic sound. And then, rather suddenly it was over. Drummer Keith Mitchell went on to fame with Mazzy Star, guitarist Michael Uhlenkott formed The Romans, Steve Thompsen eventually joined LAFMS improv trio Solid Eye and bassist (and major early crush object for yours truly) Laurie O’Connell disappeared into Northern Californian suburban family life. There are periodic rumors of re-issues and even a book documenting their fleeting existence, but for now all that remains are the handful of recordings and this one live clip from New Wave Theatre, which as far as I can tell was their very last performance together.
 

The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.

In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Wednesday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.

It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?

Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)

So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.

In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.

Debbie Harry by Andy Warhol
 
How can it be that we haven’t yet covered Blondie on this blog? What a tragic oversight! One that I must redress immediately…

I absolutely loved Blondie when I was a kid, after discovering them on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert when I would have been about ten. I recall being transfixed by how beautiful Debbie Harry was and thinking how cool she dressed. I had never seen a girl who looked like this before… and I was quite impressed. Debbie Harry made a strong impression on my young mind that a keen and idiosyncratic fashion sense most probably signaled a female creature of high intelligence (nearly, but not always, true). I was a fan from that moment on, believe me when I tell you…

The first Blondie song I heard on that day was In The Sun. I danced and pogoed around my grandparent’s living room in my socks, sliding on the floor as I did so. Watch the clip below. It was an exhilarating thing to see something like this back then. I was a kid very attuned to rock music—the way most ten-year-olds today are into SpongeBob SquarePants—and Blondie was a real sit up and pay attention change of pace from Foghat, Uriah Heap and REO Speedwagon, the groups normally seen on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
 

 
Completely aside from the insanely sassy gorgeousness of Debbie Harry, Blondie really stood apart musically from everything else that was going on at the time. Their songs were catchy, upbeat and fun. Despite their CBGBs pedigree, they really were never punks. There was a knowing calculation behind their persona, a campy, cabaret vision of ‘60s girl groups and Farfisa-infused garage pop.

For my money, the greatest artistic statement made by the band is 1980’s Autoamerican, an album reviewed poorly when it came out and that has never really been properly re-evaluated by either critics or audiences.

Autoamerican has aged very, very well. It doesn’t sound like anything else other than Blondie and so is a bit timeless in that sense. The opening track, Europa, a brooding modernist instrumental that dissolves into a spoken word rant from Harry extolling the virtues of cars. It’s an amazing song and a cool way to open the collection. The album contains both The Tide is High (originally a late ‘60s rocksteady hit in Jamaica for the Paragons and U-Roy—I bow to their genetic coolness for knowing about this song then) and Rapture, the song that, more than any other piece of music introduced the world to the concept of what rap music was. It’s a masterpiece of pop. I listened to it three times today—quite loud—and the skill, charm and verbal dexterity with which Debbie Harry casually rattles off her dada-hipster rhymes still astonishes 30 years later. It’s got a groove as funky as one written by James Brown, Prince or George Clinton, a feat almost no other white group can lay claim to.
 

 
My favorite moment on Autoamerican is T-Birds, a soaring piece of road music featuring angelic backing vocals courtesy of Flo and Eddie. If you’ve never heard Autoamerican before—and you call yourself a music fan—get your hands on it and give it a chance. Truly Autoamerican is one of the great lost albums of the New Wave era.
 
Bonus clip: Blondie do a cover of Goldfinger on German television’s Musikladen show: in 1977:
 

Apparently somewhere between thirty seconds to a minute after the opening weekend numbers for Avatar came in, the entirety of Western civilization decided to go 3D, and wholesale convert our malls and living rooms into one gigantic Disneyland of the Damned, like a Michael Bay Transformer changing state from “obnoxious and expensive” into “obnoxious, expensive, and three centimeters from your face.” Not only has Hollywood made 3D nigh-on mandatory for its big releases (presumably to combat file sharing), but 3D televisions are slated to begin rolling out this summer, despite health concerns (apparently they can cause vertigo, seizures and a host of other shocks to our woefully non-3D-adjusted systems). Perhaps it’s Michael Jackson’s revenge from beyond the grave, for barely noticing when he pioneered the technology with Captain EO back in the dark ages of 1986, or 24 BA (Before Avatar) in Hollywood years.

And now, the Internet. Intel Labs’ Sean Koehl recently predicted that the Internet will “go three-dimensional” within five to ten years—the company is currently hard at work developing the technology, touting its potential use for teleconferencing, among other business applications.

But… but. You know as well as I do that that’s not what it’s actually going to be used for.

If Koehl’s timeline bears out, somewhere between 2015 and 2020—right as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality are coming to maturity—we can expect:

Porn. I imagine the nearly-bankrupt porn industry will be all over this so quickly that they’ll just about be able to create an entire virtual reality pocket porniverse which the Global Otaku Diaspora will likely declare permanent residence in and which the rest of the world’s population will likely spend a good chunk of their waking hours in. Expect bedroom and office doors locked.

A constant, endless assault of cats. You will be like a cat lady for all the cats in the whole world, who will be all up in your face, all the time. Guess what’s in your inbox this morning? It’s another 3D video of somebody’s cat. And now it’s in your lap.

A running, inescapable feed of status updates from your friends—imagine the hovering, 3D heads of your online acquaintances popping up when you least expect them to constantly update you as to what they’re having for dinner, how much they hated Robert Pattinson’s directorial debut, or sending you a link to a 3D video of their cat being confused by their 3D computer. The thought of constantly being bothered by twelve-second video clips of the holographic heads of everybody I’ve ever exchanged two words with or been cc’d on an e-mail from, all of whose comments are bound to be equally aggravating and pointless, is enough to prompt a pre-emptive desert homestead. Are we all doomed to become like Jimmy Stewart in a doozie, with all those heads swimming around ours, all the time? Combined with augmented reality, three-dimensional Internet is going to be f___cking unavoidable. And so will everybody you know.

And good god… do we really want a three-dimensional version of Chatroulette? Do we really want to be able to see all of us, all the time, in shuddering, sickening three dimensions? Are we ready for the Slob Singularity, when everybody on the Internet can have the experience of staring directly at everybody else on the Internet; when all of our Doritos-greased faces see each other as one Being; when we all become One All-Slouching, All-Trolling, All-Wanking Consciousness?

I hope we are. Because that’s what’s coming. In glorious 3D.

(Watch Captain EO, It Is the Future: The Horrible, SAN-Depleting Future)

 
A difficult and turbulent mix of 7” singles from my collection for the sake of your aural edutainment.
 
Portsmouth Sinfonia - Also Sprach Zarathustra Op. 31 (excerpt)
Annie Anxiety - Cyanide Tears
Jimmy Smack - Untitled
Keith Rowe - Scratch Music
Joe Colley/Crawl Unit - Clay Sound
Princess Tinymeat - A Bun in the Oven
Eazy Teeth - Her Blade
The Flying Lizards - All Guitars
Minimal Man - She Was A Visitor
Stefan Weisser (Zev) - Poextensions
Sun City Girls - Eye Mohini
Project 197 - Plastic Straws
Jimmy Smack - Untitled
Caroliner - The Cooking Stove Beast
Johnny Ace - Pledging My Love
 

   Man Can Now Be Boxed And Bunched by brad laner