Sitting in my office this morning before heading off to teach I took a detour to YouTube for a search of and for a few old videos.
Let me channel a Valley Girl for just a second: Oh. My. Gawd.
It was just last December or so that I looked up White Wedding and gasped at its puerile humor and sexuality. I was able to find it again, but there were no copies of Cradle of Love — or rather, those that were there were live/TV versions or covers, not the music video. I’m sure I’ll find it again at some point.
What I went looking for, after failing to find Joachim Witt’s “Der Goldene Reiter” (a perfect example of early music videos at their worst), were a variety of Def Leppard videos.
I love Def Leppard, especially the early work, and particularly since Hysteria, which was my first expose to them back in the 8th grade during the Monday Mile run indoors in the Lake Hazel Middle School gym during those autumn and winter afternoons. Daniel Dean lent me his Walkman with the cassette in it, and so it was that grew to like them. I heard them on the radio, and so that November I got the Hysteria on CD (my first pop/rock CD) when we got our new component stereo system. Only later, as an exchange student in Gifhorn, did I come to know On Through the Night, High ‘n’ Dry, and Pyromania, and those first two, especially, are masterful and not over-produced.
Today I found a stage/live version of “Bringing on the Heartbreak” and it was a joy to listen to, even if I was experiencing through the un-joy of Flash Video via YouTube — not the world’s highest quality video or audio.
But then things got interesting. One of their most memorable radio hits was “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (from Hysteria), but the video … oh. my. gawd: atrocious. The lip-synching is off, and even if it were “on” (that is, synchronized) you would notice that it was synching not singing. Half the time it appears they’re not even saying the right words. And the video itself looks like a lame self-produced thing with a handheld camcorder in a living room spliced with a few outside shots.
And then I had to get some Army of Lovers. Eric Mulder, from my Germany trip that spring in Gifhorn, was a fan, and that is how I was introduced to “Crucified,” a marvelous piece of über-camp; the type of video that should make Madonna turn in her gap-culture-icon credentials. I then saw the video a few times that year in European MTV, and less so back in the States. When I first learned of mp3 files I came across an mp3 of “Crucified” and acquired the song. It’s the only Army of Lovers tune I’ve ever bothered to get or listen to.
Once I get past Miles Davis and a few other “Mi” groups (Minibosses, Ministry) I get to the “miscellany” directory, and Army of Lovers is about ten down from the top. As it is I finished Midnight Oil this evening, took a break to watch Battlestar Galactica (the episode from Sunday evening that deals with Lee and Bill’s reactions to Kara’s death as well as the subplot with Baltar’s lawyers [the first, who gets assassinated, and the second, around whom much of the episode revolves] — even if the lawyer is a throw-away character, he’s a great, hamming-it-up throw-away character), baked some cornbread, opened a bottle of Smoking Loon syrah, and turned on the Miles Davis.
I’m not jazz expert — classical, there I can hang with all but the most pompous of audiophiles and music geeks — and so only have a few musicians, whose names but not styles or pieces I know. Evidently Tyler knows his jazz, and so I figure I’ll ask him for some recommendations.
On the bus in this morning I got a bit more of The Secret Garden consumed, and on the bus home a bit more. In the department I chatted with Tyler, and with Angela when she arrived but really later when we were both at Fair Trade. I hauled out a little 2-3 cup Mr Coffee from storage in the copy room, cleaned it, added a filter, and brewed two cups of the cheap hazelnut ($3.79 for a 12oz. bag?) I picked up Saturday at Woodman’s. The flavor was so-so, and I think the overly-hard water is partially to blame, but the aroma was majestic.
Melissa referred to me as a “Pie Tease” when I mentioned Wednesday was Pi Day and clarified that I had not said Pie Day and would not be bringing in pie. In other contexts that could be a rather nasty term, the male equivalent of a cock tease, I suppose, but the term is only loosely attested via google, one of the few non-food references coming from a gay man’s blog featuring a photoshopped Playgirl cover.
I’ll finish with a short poem by former Pomona professor of English, Dick Barnes:
This World
That sudden movement will attract
a child to any insect–which (if it
succeed in catching it) it
will crush out: that very thingunless the child have a wise father
who can fashion a tiny halter of thread
so then the greeny gold beetle will fly and fly
and the child keep it as a toy.
This poem combines two interests from today: a feeling of nature and/or a garden (see: The Secret Garden) and the subjunctive, which we were discussing today in glass. “Succeed” here is subjunctive; were it indicative it would be, according to subject-verb agreement, “succeeds” (to go with the subject “it”), and so we could rewrite it, perhaps, as “were to succeed.”
The poem is from Barnes’s collection A Word Like Fire: Selected Poems (edited and with a foreword by Robert Mezey, New York: Handsel Books, 2005)
