Soap Star, Fake Mime, and the Herky-Jerky Guy

You tell me

There were a lot of reasons to love the song "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield.

He was cute.
He was a soap opera star.
The album it came from (Working Class Dog) featured a photo of a dog in a shirt and tie with a photo of Rick Springfield in the breast pocket.
It's pretty damn catchy.

But for me and all my friends, there was one overwhelming factor that made us love this song: the line "I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot." (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


And then there's They Might Be Giants, a band made for late-night college-hallway arguments about the meanings of their songs. But in the internet era those arguments would have to include the question does this version of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" make more or less sense than the original?


You tell me.

It Was 20 Years Ago Today

A vision of peace.

When I was growing up, it seemed impossible to imagine that the Berlin Wall would ever come down.

But 20 years ago, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, communism was going through an upheaval. A gradual inching towards freedom occurred. And travel restrictions were eased.

In part, this was because a flow of refugees from the East was forcing their way into the West.

In East Germany, millions of people (nearly 10% of the population) took to the streets -- marching for freedom.

The East German government, with the blessings of the Soviets, announced new rules that would let East Germans travel to the West.

In Berlin, tens of thousands gathered at the Berlin Wall, laughing, singing, and drinking. Then they climbed the wall. East German authorities announced that the border would be opened in the morning, but the crowds kept coming. And eventually the border was opened, without fanfare, in the middle of the night.

Later, sensing the situation was getting out of hand, East German leader Egon Krenz ordered the border guards to reseal the border by any means necessary, including deadly force.

The East German soldiers, looking out at the crowd of revelers from the East and West, made some efforts to establish order, but chose not to use any force. Over the next few days, bulldozers broke apart sections of the Wall, creating four new border crossings. Less than a year later, East and West Germany were officially reunited and only a small section of the Wall remained upright.

What had once seemed impossible had happened, virtually overnight.


John Dear, writing in The Plough challenges us to imagine ways to make the world better (read his article here.)

25 (or even 21) years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed impossible -- or at best something that might happen in some far-away future when we were all dead. That was very clear. Until it happened. And suddenly everything seemed possible.

I can't think of a better way to celebrate that anniversary than to ask what a better world will look like (and then imagine ways to bring that better world closer).

Weather... Or Not

In which, perhaps, I (briefly) control the weather.

Did I actually believe that I controlled the weather when I was in college?

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

I did have a spooky relationship with the weather back then. And would (occasionally) promise (and deliver) either snow or a sunny day on demand (or tell friends that their desired weather just wouldn't happen).

Maybe I was just in tune with the meteorological truths. Or maybe it was all just hundreds of coincidences.

But I never believed that I could control the weather and shape it to my own whims.

I still don't believe that.

And yet...

I'm up in Alaska right now. Today, I spent a lot of time with two people who rely on snow for their livelihood and they lamented the lack of white stuff on the ground. "Don't worry," I told both of them, "I brought snow up with me from Los Angeles. We don't need it down there." And I promised them snow this week.

Now, you might say that I checked the forecast on weather.com (I did). And you might know that the forecast called for snow showers later this week (it did). And you might suspect that I want people to think that I'm cool enough to be able to deliver weather on demand (you'd be right).

But the forecast said the snow wouldn't start until tomorrow.

And it started an hour after I promised snow. And hasn't stopped yet.

Coincidence? You tell me. (Link with badly synced sound for Gmail subscribers.)

Cue the Spooky Music

Cue the spooky music.

Sixteen years ago this week, Leon Theremin died.

The Russian inventor of the weird electronic instrument that you play without touching it wanted to invent something you could play without expending any mechanical energy.

I'm pretty sure he didn't think it would one day be used for this:


Or this:


This past weekend, I was at a Halloween party where someone brought a theremin. And I'm here to tell you, it's impossible to play the theremin without making weird faces. (Or at least it is for me...)

Unplug the Jukebox and Do Us All a Favor

I lost her in the fog.

"Hey," she said, "do you want to go square dancing?"

No. But not only did I not want to go. I didn't want her to want to go.

And while it was (more than) okay for me not to want to go, looking back I can see that not wanting her to want to go was a problem. And a red flag.

That's just common sense.

But when you want something as much as I wanted her, your common sense books the first flight for the tropics, leaving you stuck in the fog.


In the 1970s, Adam Ant was heading nowhere. He was in a band called Bazooka Joe that is remembered today only as the answer to the trivia question "who was the headliner at the first live Sex Pistols show?"

But Adam watched the Sex Pistols, glimpsed the future, and broke up his band. His next band, Adam and the Ants, fused ska polyrhythms, punk energy, and glam dress-up style with pirate uniforms.

He eventually got Sex Pistols svengali Malcolm McLaren to manage the band. But McLaren had little interest in Adam Ant and soon convinced the other Ants to jump ship to join Bow Wow Wow. Undeterred (or at least not wanting candy), Ant recruited Marco Pirroni (ex of Siouxsie and the Banshees) and several others as the new Adam and the Ants. Pirroni would write or co-write most of their hits, even after Ant hung up his puffy pirate shirt for good. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


I talked her out of square dancing and talked her into going to see Adam and the Ants. She hated the crowd, hated the songs, and hated the fact that there were two drummers. I loved the energy, loved the crowd, and found the music pleasant (even if it wasn't that memorable). It was like we were at two completely different concerts.

We walked back to campus in the fog and I knew all was lost.

Even before she demanded I take her square dancing the next weekend.

Years later, at the edge of a different ocean, the fog rolled in again. And I went for a walk and realized that, although I've never owned an Adam and the Ants record, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for them. Because at least they don't play square dancing music.

It's Crazy, But It's True

Compare and contrast

Growing up, I never paid any attention to Dusty Springfield; she seemed about as relevant and important as old Glenn Miller albums. In college, some of my cooler friends had copies of Dusty in Memphis, but I never really listened to any of her records until years later.

Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien was shy and demure. But when she became Dusty Springfield (who drank, popped bills, cut herself, wore wild wigs, embraced her own sexuality, and suffered from manic-depression), she was really something. And it didn't hurt that she could sing like an angel being chased down a dirt road by a devil on a motorbike. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)



The Bay City Rollers put a bubblegum shine on Dusty's song (which works about a third of the time). At times, this version seems to be less a song and more a battle to the death between different tempos and tones. And are there any non-chemical explanations for the bizarre part in the middle where the string section tries to take over the universe?



Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (later of Eurythmics) and their early band the Tourists try for a new wave/power pop feel -- dig the synthesized handclaps and cheesey early-rock-video colors. Still, Annie Lennox channeling Dusty Springfield was enough for a number 4 single in the U.K. in 1979 (although the record only got to number 83 in the U.S.).



And if one chick and some synthesized sounds are good, surely four chick singers and lots of synths must be at least four times better! And if the math doesn't quite work for you, what if they sing everything but the song's title in Japanese?



Where can you go from there except to Denmark, where Volbeat answers the question you never thought to ask: What would it sound like if Metallica covered Dusty Springfield?

Don't Bother to Wrap It; I'll Eat it Here

A Halloween Gift For You.

There's an often-repeated story about New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams that he would periodically lose his mind and have to be institutionalized. Luckily (according to the story), there was a sign that he was about to go down the rabbit hole: he would draw a cartoon showing a ghoul in a maternity ward talking to the nurse wrapping his new offspring in swaddling clothes. The caption? "Don't bother to wrap it; I'll eat it here."

And whenever Addams would turn in this cartoon, the higher-ups at the New Yorker would phone Bellevue and have him taken away until he was sane enough to continue his regular life.

I love this story. Now there's no evidence that it's true (the cartoon in question doesn't exist, which would be odd if Addams redrew it many times) and Addams himself is just perverse enough to have come up with this story himself (in any event, he delighted when people retold it).


This makes me love the story even more.

And, ultimately isn't that what Halloween is all about? A chance to move between worlds -- shifting phase between fantasy and reality, between earthly and unearthly, between the dead and the undead?

So... as a token of the season, Amy Engelhardt (aka Mrs. Clicks and Pops) has a Halloween gift for you: Head over to her MySpace page for a free download of "Are You Dead or Are You Undead" from her album Not Gonna Be Pretty.