The break starts with another excellent animated MTV promo. (Whoever was in charge of these must have been having a blast.) This one stars marionettes in a drawing room that appears to be inspired by Marie Antoinette. The sexiest marionette, with a drink in hand and red pants so tight they look like they were painted on (the metaphor becomes truth!), gives a kiss on the cheek to a grotesquely fat marionette, while another doll plays the piano. Another kiss for a squat little doll in a white tuxedo with a camera around his neck: his head pops open in a cascade of Russian nesting dolls, revealing three more heads in progressively smaller sizes.

There’s a lot of visual information to absorb in just ten seconds: if I wasn’t rewatching and freeze-framing, I probably wouldn’t notice the giant doll heads embedded in the white walls. We pan over to a window, where a cat outside is mewing. Sexy marionette walks over. The window opens (it’s not clear whether she opens it), and everyone in the room is sucked out, as if it was hard vacuum outside. The grotesquely fat marionette knocks out a chunk of the wall in the shape of an M, which becomes part of the MTV logo. The cat sleeps happily on the floor of the empty room.

Next: a sixty-second spot for The January Man. I told you they ran this ad incessantly during this countdown: this is the second time in less than an hour. I don’t think I’m ready to recap it yet.

Then an ad for Bud Bowl I! If you don’t remember the Bud Bowl, it was a series of ads that ran during seven Super Bowls (from 1989 to 1997), where through the magic of stop-motion animation, longneck bottles of Budweiser and Bud Lite would play a football game, thereby fulfilling the long-held dreams of, well, nobody. A camera swoops dramatically around a computer-generated stadium (which looks pretty decent, even by today’s standards, which means it must have been jaw-dropping state-of-the-art twenty years ago).

An announcer says, “Football fans, get ready for the battle of the century.” Clearly, Anheuser-Busch knew they were onto something, given that they appended that Roman numeral to the inaugural event. (If you were curious, Budweiser ended up beating Bud Lite 27 to 24–the precise outcome of fully three of the seven Bud Bowls.) “Pick up your scoreboard wherever you see this display,” the announcer says. Two animated bottles of beer stop by the display–speaking just for myself, I’m not ready for the theological/economic/cannibalistic implications of bottles of beer buying and drinking other bottles of beer.

The next commercial starts with the lick from “More Than a Feeling,” and an announcer promising “100 percent pure solid rock!” Yes, it’s Formula 45, a compilation album from Silver Eagle that sounded much like turning into your local classic-rock station for a few hours: Toto’s “Hold the Line,” Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way.” It also had a few hits that wouldn’t be found on most AOR stations: John Waite’s “Missing You,” Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles.” (That last one doesn’t get mentioned during the ad.) Four LPs would have set you back $19.95; three CDs, $29.95. When they play an excerpt of “Feels Like the First Time,” they throw a black-and-white picture of Foreigner up on the screen, and I realize I have no idea what those guys looked like. Judging by the evidence here, Foreigner were six brothers with long hair and identical leather jackets. The website Crap From the Past informs me that Formula 45 was also available under the title 1st and 10, with a picture of OJ Simpson on the cover.

Our commercial break ends with another great MTV bumper. You might remember this one: a scientist (white lab coat, spectacles) sleeps in an armchair in what is presumably his office. An animal skeleton on his bookshelf comes to life, grabs a pair of scissors, and proceeds to reshape the scientist’s tufty red hair. He wakes up, dismayed, to find that his hair has been styled into the MTV logo.

posted 24 June 2008 in 1988. 4 comments

The first installment in an irregular series of posts, highlighting some of the more improbable lyrics I run across.

Writing about “Always on My Mind” got me listening to my old Pet Shop Boys albums. Generally, they hold up really well, but Introspective does have a few clunkers. Neil Tennant mispronounces “Debussy.” He fails to use the subjunctive in “I’m Not Scared” (although it wouldn’t matter with 99% of singers, it sounds wrong when Tennant sings “if I was you” instead of “if I were you”). And “Left to My Own Devices” includes this couplet:

When I get home it’s late at night / I pour a drink and watch the fight.

Really, has there ever been a pop star who seemed less likely to be a boxing fan?

posted 23 June 2008 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments

I relaunched this website about two months ago and haven’t done much to promote it, other than emailing a bunch of friends to let them know I had found a new way to waste time. But I hugely appreciate everyone who’s linked to it, and this seems like a good moment to be reciprocal:

My new favorite blog is One Poor Correspondent by Tom Nawrocki, formerly of Rolling Stone (he edited a substantial chunk of the Secret Rock Knowledge when it was a magazine column). If you have any interest in the arcana of pop music or Saturday Night Live, you’ll want to check it out. Some recent highlights include the list of rock songs that mention various ages and an epic debate over the chart history of Paul McCartney’s “Coming Up” (I came out on the losing end of that one).

You know the comic strip “Tom the Dancing Bug,” right? You know creator “Ruben Bolling” is a genius, right? He doesn’t seem to have a Los Angeles outlet, so I’m glad he’s started a blog.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, one of the most excellent people on the planet, is now a radio personality and has a brilliant book about her real-estate odyssey coming out next year (it’s called Gimme Shelter), but because this is the Internet, you can have the immediate gratification of checking out her blog. Don’t miss the vintage ’80s photo.

I was surprised, yet delighted, to be linked to by the Cher Scholar blog (a division of the Chersonian Institute, or so I am told).

posted 23 June 2008 in Links. no comments yet

A few years ago, I brought my camera along to a (long, dull) video shoot for Los Lonely Boys, in a small town about an hour north of Austin, Texas. This was my favorite picture of the day.

(More flipwalks next week.)

posted 20 June 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

There are two essential out-of-print music books that I own only in treasured Xerox copies. One is Jon Savage’s The Kinks: The Official Biography. The other is Chris Heath’s Pet Shop Boys, Annually. I had never thought until today about the similarities between Ray Davies and Neil Tennant–British songwriters with a particular gift for lonely melodies and closely observed foibles of the human heart–but obviously, something about their music sends me to the photocopier. (And inspires me to write at excessive length. I apologize in advance.)

Annually came out in 1988: it contained sixty pages of Pet Shop Boys arcana, including photo spreads of Neil Tennant’s coats and Chris Lowe’s sunglasses; interviews about the creation of “It’s a Sin,” “Rent,” and “Heart”; a history of Tennant’s employment by Marvel Comics; and two pages on the staircase designed by Lowe when he spent a year working for an architecture firm. Oh, and there was a crossword. The only disappointment for me was that it revealed Chris Lowe actually was crucial to the creation of the group’s music: I always treasured the image of him standing stoically behind Neil in the videos, not doing anything, and hoped that he was just as vestigial in every element of the Pet Shop Boys.

When I met Chris Heath, some years later, I asked him why there had never been any more editions of the book, given that the title seemed to promise one every twelve months. He gently explained to me that in England, an “annual” is a year-end compendium of information sold in stores such as Woolworth’s: you might buy an annual on your favorite football star or on a comics character such as Asterix. (He ended up writing many more words on the Pet Shop Boys anyway, including two excellent full-length books: Literally and Pet Shop Boys Versus America.)

Without Annually, I would have had no idea what was going on in the “Always on My Mind” video. (Not that I understand it all that well with it.) The song, you may remember, is the Boys’ version of an Elvis Presley hit (also done by Willie Nelson). The video features Chris and Neil in a large old-fashioned car. Chris, in a leather jacket, has the steering wheel (on the British side, of course), while Neil is wearing a tuxedo, accessorized with a white scarf. In the back seat, there is a hulking hitchhiker, who appears to have wandered in from a black-and-white horror movie. “Ooh hoo hoo, I love the radio,” the hitchhiker says in a spooky voice as the video begins. (MTV cut off most of the intro, where the hitchhiker says, “I smell youth. Vintage youth.”)

It turns out that most, if not all, of what follows is taken from the Pet Shop Boys’ picaresque movie It Couldn’t Happen Here, only briefly released in the United States (and never available on DVD, it seems). I’ve never seen the movie (although I just purchased a used videotape on Amazon–I’ll report back), which puts it alongside other movies that I know only through MTV videos, where the films’ narrative logic is vaguely communicated through an assortment of quick cuts. Vision Quest, I’m looking at you.

Nighttime on a British boardwalk: people watching old-fashioned “What the Butler Saw” movies on penny-slot hand-cranked Mutoscopes. We see flickering sepia-toned images of a heavyset maid being goosed and kissed by one man (Neil in a fake beard) and slowly chased around a couch by another (Chris in a horse-riding getup). Then Chris reclines on the couch and the maid leaps on top of him. A man in dark round sunglasses walks away from the machine. Cut to Neil at the seashore, standing by a snack bar. Women are doing aerobics in the parking lot. He gets on a bicycle. Chris, in a knit cap, appears to be putting his own bike away, and then runs down the coastline. A grinning man with fake oversized ears gestures wildly and eats some toast.

Neil starts singing, and we return to the car (as we will do frequently throughout the following action). We see distorted bodies in funhouse mirrors: British schoolboys, Neil in a gold Elvis jumpsuit, Chris in his usual leather jacket and knit cap. Somebody appears to be filming a heavy-metal video where a white-haired star reclines on the hood of a car. (Sorry, this is England–the bonnet.) A red car drives past a casino, and three hip-hoppers gesture as it goes.

Neil keeps singing. The lurking horror known as the hitchhiker in the back seat starts moving his shoulders in time to the music, and grows overexcited enough to fondle his own face. This is really a great single–the propulsive beat just makes the callous indifference of the lyrics all the starker.

Neil’s in a red phone booth, talking to a distressed blonde woman in a floral dress. A waitress in a café drops a plate without looking at it. Neil and Chris sit on a bench at a train station, while two conductors lead a zebra across the tracks. (Was this intended as a visual pun for “zebra crossing,” British for crosswalk?) The conductors’ faces, we see, are painted in black-and-white zebra stripes. Chris looks at them, but seems bored.

Neil rides a train, passing by some cows. A man adjusts his bad toupee; a ventriloquist’s dummy raises its eyebrows. Chris raises his own eyebrows and cracks a smile! An actual Chris Lowe facial expression!

“Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” Neil sings, glancing over at Chris. One way of interpreting the body of the Pet Shop Boys’ work is as a sequence of songs that Neil sings while Chris looks on silently, as his friend, or his conscience. Another is that Neil is actually singing them all to Chris, but that they have so thoroughly crushed each others’ hearts, they can barely stand to look at each other.

Chris and Neil walk in slow motion through a train station, where a tableau of what appear to be World War I soldiers are listening to a violinist play. Neil consults with a gypsy fortune teller (Chris in disguise, Annually tells me).

The hitchhiker (prolific British actor Joss Ackland) starts singing along. “Where are you going?” Chris asks him, looking in the rear-view mirror. “I’m going there,” the hitchhiker says. “But I like it here, wherever it is.”

Any pretense of plot disappears as the editor throws in all the bits of the movie that haven’t been used yet: Footage of a reclining pilot, then a biplane curving through the British sky. Disco dancers. A car showroom. Chris throws a plate of food on a woman.

“Stop the car!” says the hitchhiker. “I’m getting out. You are no longer here.” The car halts, and so does the video.

“Always on My Mind” is credited in the text block as being on Actually. As regular commenter Chris Molanphy noted recently, it wasn’t actually a bonus track on the album: EMI just bundled a separate physical single into the Actually package. (A longer, remixed version appeared on the Pet Shop Boys’ next album, Introspective; the hit version can also be found in the Discography package.) Regardless, the single hit #4 on the pop charts. You can watch the video here.

posted 19 June 2008 in 1988. 5 comments

I’ve got another piece up at the Barnes and Noble Review: this one‘s a short review of The Complete Peanuts: 1967 to 1968. Two additional buying recommendations in a similar vein: 1. Schulz and Peanuts, the stellar biography from last year by David Michaelis. 2. Any previous volume of The Complete Peanuts (or all of them). In the fifth year of Fantagraphics’ reprints, it still feels like a small miracle that every six months, I get a beautiful hardcover collection of Peanuts.

posted 18 June 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet

The video opens with Cher and some boytoy looking at themselves in the same mirror. He’s wearing a white scoop-neck t-shirt, cut low in both the back and the front, and has a big puffy poodle haircut. Cher looks exactly like she did in 1978, or in 1998. The boytoy is fussing with his hair. The camera pulls back to reveal his studded belt, Cher’s gray mini-dress, and the dozen burning candles.

Cher walks out of the mirror room into a bedroom, which like the mirror room, appears to be decorated by Pottery Barn. Her hair is bigger and more lustrous than the boytoy’s–as always, Cher wins! Boytoy angrily follows her, and snatches a black jacket out of her hands as he leaves. Flashback: Cher rubbing foreheads with Boytoy in happier times, when he had bigger hair than the current version. (Boytoy, by the way, is Rob Camilletti, who was her actual 24-year-old boyfriend at the time.) Neither of them appear to be wearing a shirt, so rubbing foreheads basically equals full-frontal on-camera penetration.

The music swells. (This song was cowritten by Michael Bolton, and is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from him: a competent but uninspired radio-ready power ballad. Inspirational lyric: “I remember the thunder talkin’ about that fire in your eyes.” Most of the single’s kick comes from Cher selling the hell out of it.) We return briefly to the present day, where Cher looks pensive while reclining on her bed, turning her head so we can better see the full volume of her hair.

Another flashback: a nightclub with just enough extras to make it look populated, if not crowded. There’s some neon dangling from the ceiling. Cher is dancing with Boytoy, who dips her, and then spots a pissy blonde girl, who walks by with a meaningful glance. Boytoy stares.

We hit the chorus and cut to Cher in performance, leading her band in front of a sparse crowd. She’s wearing a totally indecent outfit: a black mesh bodysuit over a black bra and panties, covered by a black leather jacket that she keeps trying to shrug off. It’s not quite as provocative as the similar-but-crotchier ensemble in the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video the following year, when she cavorted with sailors, but I don’t think there’s another 42-year-old woman on the planet who could have pulled this look off.

Back to the Pottery Barn bedroom. Cher pulls chainmail pantyhose up her leg, fluffs her hair, and fastens the chainmail pantyhose to (yes!) a chainmail garter. More hair-fluffing, just so we understand that her hair’s the real star of this video. She struts back into that club in her chainmail outfit, and embraces a guy with enormous hair, the only other person who can compete with Cher’s coiffure. He’s wearing a black wifebeater shirt, cut very low on the sides. Boytoy is in a booth with Pissy Blonde: they both stare at Cher.

Cut to Cher on the dancefloor with a totally new guy with tousled hair, groping her from behind and grinding against her. “I found someone to take away the heartache,” Cher sings as we hit the chorus again, but I’m losing track of all the someones she’s found in this video. Boytoy stares at her from across the dancefloor, ignoring how Pissy Blonde is rubbing against his leg and throwing her head back, offering up her throat. Cher hoists her leg onto the hipbone of Tousled Hair, and then pivots as she teases her hair with her fingers. Boytoy stalks across the dancefloor and pulls Cher towards him. She turns away, and Boytoy grabs her again. She slaps him, and then turns to walk away with Enormous Hair–not the guy she was just dancing with.

Cher, in the same chainmail outfit, struts down a traintrack. Her guitarist walks beside her, rocking out as he plays the solo. Wow, this is the most excellent video ever. Cher, no lie, is running her fingers through her hair.

We return to the performance segment, and it turns out that the sparse crowd is actually a half-dozen pairs of dancers grinding against each other. One female dancer gets thrown into the air and twirled.

In the Pottery Barn bedroom, Cher throws some clothes into a suitcase, and then hurls a framed photo of her and Boytoy against the floor. If you watch in slow motion, you can see that the glass is broken before it hits the tiles. Then Boytoy glides into the frame and puts his arm around her. They press their foreheads together again. We cut to Cher in black-lace performance, overcome by emotion and on her knees, before we return to a tight shot of Cher and Boytoy, him with a delighted smile, her with a reluctant one.

“I Found Someone” hit #10 on the Billboard singles charts. You can watch it here.

posted 17 June 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

About ten years ago, Wired had a regular feature where they did “interviews” with dead people. They kicked it off with a cover story on Marshall McLuhan; it turned out that skillful excerpts from the works of sufficiently interesting thinkers of the past could create the illusion of a modern conversation. I stumbled on a fascinating polymath scientist, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) while reading an essay about his cousin Charles Darwin, and convinced the editors of Wired that Galton’s interests (eugenics, experimental psychology) were relevant to the present day. (This was debatable, actually, but Galton was such a character, I couldn’t resist him: in addition to being an explorer and scientist, he invented “Arithmetic by Smell.”)

Wired stopped running those historical interviews before they printed mine, so its readers never learned Galton’s thoughts on reading the newspaper underwater and how best to measure the ass of a Hottentot woman. (They officially killed the format about a week after my editor assured me that the rumors I had heard about its demise were absolutely untrue, so I should go ahead and do a second draft. Gee, thanks, Bill.) But I got to spend a great day reading 19th-century volumes at the British Library (the new one, not the same building where Marx did his writing), and it immediately became one of my favorite places in London.

posted 16 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

Returning once again to February 2005:

The photo and report for my twenty-seventh flipwalk can be found here.

David Adam Edelstein was generous enough (and obsessive enough) to make a map of my first twenty-five flipwalks. Check it out and see all the places I ended up, and how they cluster. And then go visit his cool photography blog.

posted 13 June 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

Every now and then I learn a nugget of information that really lights up the gossip columns and the blogosphere. I think the last time might have been when Ashton Kutcher told me about the Bush twins’ visit to his house (“I go upstairs to T.J.’s room and I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open up the door and T.J.’s smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah”). Today is another one of those times.

posted 12 June 2008 in Outside. no comments yet