It seems like a century ago. I listened to the radio on my way to high school, a Catholic high school, a Catholic all-boys high school (if you need to diagnose any of my ailments, please begin there), since there was no better way than to start the day with rebellious rock n’ roll emanating from a small portable radio.
And lest you think the rock was not rebellious, or at least packaged to sound so, let me just me mention that the station being listened to on this particular morning was WHBI-FM, a local oddity that used to rent itself out to foreign programmers, but also had two “punk” programs that played the best and weirdest punk and new wave records — the two featured DJs (a guy named Phil Barry and a Brit called "Scratchy") were clearly into freaking out the listener, and I remember hearing the beloved Barnes and Barnes’ “Cemetery Girls” (their snappy ode to necrophilia) as well as a truly creepy story-song about kids picking on a fat girl at school (all this in the late-evening hours, listening on a transistor, or on my way to prison… er, school).
The morning I remember in particular the song below was playing. Yes, the video you’re about to watch is hopelessly silly, the performer looks ridiculous — plus I was stunned and amused to see his song punctuated with wonderfully cheesy German “saucy” comedy.
Just imagine, though, the song hitting a teenager, back then on a crappy little radio. The melody (actually, the backing track, if I’m not mistaken) stolen from the greatest French “New Wave” tune of all time, actually a tongue-in-cheek punk parody of sorts, the immortal Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi” which can be seen and heard here.
This rip-off English song had a nasty little homoerotic lyric that absolutely freaked the shit out of my mother when she heard it come out of the radio (she loved William B. Williams, as I did, but hey, a kid’s gotta grow up some time). She told me I should turn it off, but much to her credit, didn’t shut the radio off herself (plus the song was already just about over by the time she registered how “dirty” it was).
I know this entire event reeks of a past time before teens were all-knowing and exposed to just about everything under the sun. I guess I’m happy to have lived through those innocent moments, and to have experienced, through WHBI’s “punk” music programs and WBAI’s amazing, still radical free-form shows, a time when regular old commercial radio could be challenging, weird, upsetting, and yes, just plain “dirty” for its era. What followed thereafter (Stern, “O&A,” and the rest…) was all pathetic compared to some insane dude singing about getting head from another guy during the breakfast hour….
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Still "unabideable": the slippery streets of the city
I wrote a blog entry when I had health insurance from my job, and now I have none, so it’s even more relevant. It involves the increasingly slippery sidewalks of NYC, and it can be found here
Since my last rant-post mentioned Queens, I will now evoke Brooklyn and say that I’m freelancing (ah, the life of instability, how it molds the modern man…) a block away from the shopping area laughingly called the “Fulton Mall.” It’s a commercial area filled with crappy clothing stores blasting awful music (although it does have cheesy low-rent emporia that fascinate me like the one in the pic), but it also has one of my chief banes, one that can only get worse when it rains (rhyme unintentional, but inevitable): the new-model pavement that appears in so many commercial and upscale areas of the Five Boroughs. It's not quite the marbleized nightmare that rules Park Avenue and other upscale districts in Manhattan, but it also isn't the old traditional gray, drab, reliable kind (read: it's wretched to navigate during a downpour). In other words, if you’re uninsured, or old, or unsteady on your pins, you just know you’re going to take a tumble. The only solution, besides wearing rubbers or rubber-soled shoes everywhere, alla time, is to take baby-steps and proceed with ever so much care when the torrents are upon the city. No, we don’t need no national healthcare, not at all, ever….
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