La Vie En Robe

Taco Tuesday: Special Earth Day Edition

On this week's "Taco Tuesday," my buddy Jay and I take this Earth Day opportunity to discuss the virtures of wind power. It's truly an episode for the ages — ages 4 to 10, to be exact...

Soar On, Sweet Bird

I don't even know what to say about the strange, abrupt and sad passing of Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, except that it's not a coincidence that the year of his brilliant rookie season also happened to be the year I fell in love with baseball.

Fidrych was like Harpo Marx reincarnated as a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers — he was a clown and a goofball, sure, but he also radiated a cosmic joy that was beautiful to behold, and he could back it up by pitching rings around the best teams in the American League. These days, most pitchers never throw 24 complete games in their entire careers; The Bird threw 24 in a single season, and rarely seemed to break a sweat (or lose his sheer excitement over being in the big leagues in the first place) in the process. And then it was pretty much over, thanks to knee and shoulder injuries; but for one glorious season, he gave Tigers fans — and baseball fans all around the country — something to smile about. As Jim Caple writes in this excellent obit, he was the kind of gate attraction who, whenever and wherever he pitched, could regularly pull in 20-30 thousand over the average fan attendance.

Unlike the late, great Dock Ellis, I never got to see The Bird play in person; but like Ellis, Fidrych was a major inspiration for my baseball book, and for the way I see and live my life in general. And now they're both gone. If I were Dick Allen, Bill Lee or Jim Bouton, I'd definitely start looking twice before crossing the street...

Political Satire At Its Finest

I'm very proud to say that I actually know some of the people involved with this...

Future Schlock

I've loved Robin Gibb's "Boys Do Fall In Love" for so long, it hardly qualifies as a guilty pleasure at this point — even though I was all about the Replacements and Husker Du at the time I first, er, fell in love with the song.
    Co-written by Robin with brother Maurice, the song falls squarely into one of my favorite (and most sorely underappreciated) musical genres — synth-pop songs by artists who had absolutely zero in the way of new wave cred or vision, but decided to boogie their way onto the bandwagon just the same. These "Fake Wave" efforts (see also Rick Springfield's "The Human Touch," the Village People's "Action Man," and Queen's "Radio Ga Ga") heavily relied upon the use of sequencers, synthesizers, electronic drums, synthetic handclaps, and quasi-robotic vocals. And if the lyrics didn't provide an appropriately futuristic hook (a la Nick Gilder's "Into The 80s," Alice Cooper's "Clones" or Pat Benatar's "My Clone Sleeps Alone"), you could always add a little quasi-futuristic flash when it came time to film the video.
    Which brings me back to "Boys Do Fall In Love." Like so many songs that came out in 1984, it's impossible for me to even think of this without picturing the accompanying video; 8 times outta 10, the first time I heard new hits that year was while watching either Friday Night Videos (where I caught the network debut of Journey's schmaltz-tastic "Faithfully" clip) or Channel 66, a UHF station which filled the MTV-less void (urban Chicago wouldn't get cable until years later, which is a whole other rant/blog post in itself) by playing music videos 24 hours a day. Channel 66 played "Boys Do Fall In Love" all the fucking time; and while it was totally the sort of thing I was pre-disposed to hate at the time — in those days, I despised anything with synthesizers — the chorus melody (esp. the "Heartbeat/As they dance in the street/To a ray-dio-o-oh" part) just sent undeniable tickles up the back of my neck, and the song proved impossible to remove from my brain. And the "solo," wherein the spoken word "boys" is sampled and then played back on a keyboard in percussive, octave-hopping fashion — "Buh-buh-buh-buh-BOY-boys!" — so delecately walked the line between utter genius and sheer idiocy, I could only bow in humble homage.
    But the video...dear god, the video! So much wrong with it, it's fantastically right. First of all, there's Robin moping about as some sort of ghostly narrator — or maybe the futuristic power of his new wave shades allows him to be invisible to others, as well as teleport from scene to scene. In any case, his over-dramatic use of sunglasses brings up the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum, Fake Wave-style: Did they shoot the cover for his Secret Agent album first, then decide they should have Robin fumble with the specs in the "Boys" video, to remind people to buy the album? Or did they shoot the album cover after the video, convinced that the video would be such a hit, people would be flocking to the record shops in search of "that guy with the sunglasses"?
    And then there's "The Future," as portrayed in the video. Because clearly, in the future we will all be accessorizing our Parachute outfits with tinfoil, and hanging out in fern bars that look like the loading bay of the Starship Enterprise, while musicians who make Spandau Ballet look dignified tootle away in the background. Girls will wear their hair in either early '70s Warhol superstar frizzes or exaggerated punk do's, while boys will all be rocking some variation on the John Stamos guido puff. And we will all have robot servants, of course...
    Here's the thing that throws me, though: I could SWEAR that the original version of the "Boys" video played up the robot servant's unrequited love for his frizzy-haired mistress; I could also absolutely swear (and in fact did just that last night while telling a friend about this "fucking amazing" sequence) that, during the "Buh-buh-buh-buh-BOY-boys!" part, the two robots did a whole pop-and-lock routine in time to the music. But in this clip, they start into it... and then the video abruptly cuts back to an earlier scene where the robot is waiting on the girl. Huh? Is it possible that my fevered brain completely fabricated the memory of sad robots doing a stiff and poignant tandem breakdance? Having lived with said brain for nearly 43 years now, I have to admit that it is indeed entirely possible; yet, the image remains so ridiculously vivid (not to mention vividly ridiculous), that I can't quite believe I made it up. Or was the scene included in the original version then later excised, due to a complaint from the android union, or changing public attitudes regarding the exploitation of robots? Enjoy the video, and decide for yourself...

Scary Shit

It was quite the Friday night in Palm Springs — and to paraphrase Paul Stanley, I'm not talkin' 'bout no Dinah Shore Weekend debauchery, nee-thuh. Some relentless, high-speed winds blew down a buncha power lines (this Desert Sun photo was taken along Vista Chno, about five blocks west of my house) and whipped up a fire along the Tramway Road, about two miles from my neighborhood. Thankfully, the Palm Springs Fire Department had their shit together, and quickly contained the blaze before it could spread to more heavily populated areas. Wish Southern California Edison was that prepared; seems that the winds are blowing down power poles along Vista Chino every other week, and they still haven't figured out what to do about it. They also can't seem to tell me when my power will come back on; at this point, I've been without electricity for 18 hours. Thankfully, my local Starbucks has power and wi-fi...

But yes, in case you were wondering, my house, Queen Peelu and myself are all doin' fine...