80’s Rapesax, Cont.

Ok.  Alright listen up.  There is absolutely nothing, NOTHING that we can say about the above video that won’t be confirmed 3000x by just turning up your volume, dimming the lights, and watching the whole godforsaken thing.  If you only watch ONE video out of the completely nightmarish collection that we have horrifically curated for you, holy crap friends this is the one.  Every worrisome theme and uncomfortable undertone we have discussed is present in this video up front and center.  Please note the frequency of the sax player’s appearance, who at first is known only as a phantom rapesax melody but more reoccuringly shows up as some kind of apparition of intimacy as the man and the woman walk down the street and actually walk past — without even looking over — at the white man playing saxophone outside of a bleakly closed electronics store.  The end of the video is completely unreal and confirms everything we have said here in the past few posts and then some.  Also of note is the frequency of Miami Vice.  A lazy critic would say this is bccause the song was commissioned as a tie-in video for the television series but we, well, we’re just not that lazy.

Was the American television show Miami Vice (1984-1989) some kind of secret corner/touchstone to the whole wretched 80’s Noir/Neo Trash/Crackpipe/Rapesax Micro-Genre?  The Real Neon Day-Glo Nightmare from whence the shadows are truly cast?  You tell me, man.  We will send you no further than the following scene.  Again, we implore you watch the video in its entirety.

Wow.

Miami Vice.

Billy Hicks and Rapesax

Lead by Dr. H. Rutherford Cumberbacht, a group of respected historians has pinpointed the zenith and subsequent gradual downfall of the rapesax. Much like Rome peaked during its transformation from a republic to a monarchy under Julius and Augustus Caesar, the rapesax reached unparalleled heights when 80s heartthrob Rob Lowe transformed into the character of Georgetown dive bar superstar Billy Hicks (St. Elmo’s Fire). In Billy Hicks, the rapesax had its Caesar. To truly delve into the complex soul of his character, Lowe reportedly had teenage maidens sent to his dressing room on a daily basis. At this point, the power of the rapesax was so great that said trysts launched some of these teenagers into mega-stardom. It is rumored that Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera were among those initiated into ‘The Order of the Harlot’ during visits with ‘Mr. Hicks.’ However, greatness cannot last forever, and the latter half of the 1980s were a period of decadent decline for the rapesax. Citing a simple case of history repeating itself, Dr. Cumberbacht says the fall of the rapesax mirrored the tragic path of the once mighty Roman Empire. As the iconic Billy Hicks had been its Caesar, Kenny G conversely became its Caligula. Dr. Cumberbacht and his team expect continued discoveries on the potency of the rapesax as they shift their examination to the complete catalog of Foreigner.

The Discussion Continues: Loren Hunt on 80’s Rapesax (Or In This Case, Rapepiano)

“She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they say
Separated by fools
Who don’t know what love is yet
But I want you to know

If I could fly
I’d pick you up
I’d take you into the night
And show you a love
Like you’ve never seen, ever seen”

Since there is no existing video for this to be found readily on
YouTube, you’re going to have to use your imagination along with the
album cover to recreate the foggy neon greasy-puddlescape that Benny
Mardones is walking through while coming up with ways to make
statutory rape sound like the greatest love of all. I don’t recall any
rapesax in this song, but there is certainly rapepiano, which sounds
like some sort of not-yet-invented salad green but is in actuality THE
CREEPIEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE. This rapepiano brings up visuals of
fake-Victorian brocade curtains blowing in the open window of an oily,
minimally-decorated bachelor pad as Benny’s poufy mullet flops
dramatically over the piano keys and he contorts in the blue-balled
agony of what I am 99% certain he would refer to casually as “his
situation.” This is what’s happening when he’s not walking through the
puddlescape of the video that may or may not exist somewhere but is
for reasons inexplicable not available to us. My ovaries are in my
throat as I write this. God, I hope he left her alone.

Which brings us to:

So, by authority of all the episodes of Criminal Minds episodes that
I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that boy WASN’T right. Did you see the part
where he set his own house on fire after it was implied that his dad
died in a war and his mom became a hooker? It’s hard to dramatize
bedwetting and hurting animals without getting into some kind of
trouble, but you know he did those things too. That’s the psycho
killer warning sign trinity. I know things. You can’t fool me, Marx.

Major bonus points for the little inquisition reenactment in the
middle. They think you did it because you did, not because you were a
sensitive child growing up in some sort of generic midwestern non-town
prone to doing things even as an adult like sitting by the bank of a
river crying and cutting your mullet off.

This just proves to me that the tenets of Rapesax 80s are not purely
urban in nature. They rely more on this overruling aesthetic that
people who do creepy shit are somehow more interesting than the rest
of us, perhaps even sympathetic. As evidence, I give you the video
that even as an eight year old, I knew enough to feel dirty watching:

The Discussion Continues: One Reader Writes

re: 80s neo-noir, rape-y saxophone genre of awful

I distinctly remember some cartoon (it may have been more than one, or it may have been a movie) that was always coming on UPN or TBS in the late 80s/early 90s in the afternoon when I got home from school. Don’t know the name and can’t remember any particular plotline but it was very gritty, urban a la New York in the 80s but with like, more industrial yards or abandoned freight cars in foggy, destitute fields. Perpetually dark, grey, foggy city. The show was about detectives/cops, always wearing wide brimmed hats, 1930s suits, sleaves rolled up. I can’t really remember any female characters. The main character(s?) was (were) always chasing criminals, down alleyways or across rooftops or something. Actually, they always seemed to be in some back alleyway or something…dirty puddles of water everywhere. Kind of Lynchian/definitely scary for a 5 or 6 year old to be watching. It may have been anime. It was definitely so shitty. I remember when it would come on, I’d immediately get a headache. There was saxophone music for sure, but I remember it being like, put over some more action-y theme music in the beginning. The show probably wasn’t on the air for very long, and it may have even been rerun when I saw it, because it was on one of those shitty network tv channels. I’ve tried looking for it on youtube but haven’t found anything that comes close. It’s really the embodiment of that whole terrible genre. Maybe you can find it.

-Boo

Daily Miltonian Presents: The Bader/Zahradnik Notes

In the interest of preserving the always-interesting stories behind the the people who bring you your Daily Miltonian, Fort Saint Davids is proud to present a recent afternoon’s correspondence between Miltonian Principals Alexander Zahradknik and Erik Bader.  Longtime close and faithful readers will recall our 2006 explorations into the unbelievably awful genre (that we had discovered and thus coined) “Eighties Desert Music” and the following exchange further explores this kind of brave, unflinching approach to History as only we at the Miltonian know it.  Enjoy.

____________

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Alexander Zahradnik wrote:

i want to explore another 80’s genre that i didn’t like very much. it’s much shittier and much more crushing than 80’s desert. this one is much harder to describe so i’m just going to list elements from it:
rainy urban streets
ALWAYS dark
red neon shining through crummy hotel room blinds casting stripey shadows on the wall
underpinnings of prostitution
“supertramp”-style sleazy saxophones
80’s noir so like the guys are dressed up like costumed sleek 30’s detectives but their shitty bushy 80’s hair is always puffing up under their fedoras
cigarettes
smells like bad pizza; the feeling of being out in the rain in the city, and the piping hot stretchy pizza cheese that you are eating slaps you in the chin and burns your skin
fear of urban areas
“cops”
cobblestones, but no sense of history
intertwining networks of alleyways like every city is 17th-century london
disease

what is that genre? what are its cultural precedents? what paved the way? the sleazy sax is a key element

-Alex

_____

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Erik Bader wrote:

It’s post white flight post crack near bankruptcy in cities like LA Philly and New York.

Think Philly in mannequin, trading places. bums near firecans.

WATCHMEN the comic

dark knight returns (frank miller)

ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING

urban scenes outside arcade in TRON

80s cities were beyond fucked up

crack and graffitti

for digital images, refer to games streets of rage, vigilante, bad dudes, renegade and double dragon

a bandana, nunchucks and a basic knowledge of the martial arts were key to survival

those were the urban streets of the 80s

-e

Feb 19 (2 days ago)
Erik Bader
to Alexander

ALSO OMG think about the alleys in the Terminator…like 40 bums sleeping behind a dumpster, helicopter strobes overhead, barking dogs and rats running everywhere

always some random leather jacketed ‘gang member’ on some kind of drugs with a switchblade

‘gimme ya clothes’

-e

_____

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Alexander Zahradnik wrote:

yeah yeah but think about the music that accompanies this all

fuggen sleaziest rapesax

omg so sick

you’re totally right about the crack – that’s the precedent

in the 50’s and 60’s the inner cities were cool, jewish, beatnik, west side story dance musical places.
the 70’s you see what’s that movie French Connection? that’s the beginning of the end.

next thing you know, 80’s noir
what was with all the 20’s and 30’s detective themes recurring in the 80’s??
you think white people viewed themselves as vigilantes against this black crack epidemic, and the most readily accessible stylistic reference they could latch onto was that of the old hollywood “bogie” archetype – but they just fucked it up way bad.

listen to how “crack vigilante/watchmen” careless whispers is
also-machine man
‘za for pizza and ro’s for robots

_____

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Erik Bader wrote:

Alex please watch this video:

As a pre-teen this pretty much defined 80’s teen culture to me.  Beyond sleeeeze rapesax outdoor concert with teens going wild, ‘courtship’ consisting of staring at the gyrating girl of your choice, urged on no doubt by the beyondo sick sounds of huge/muscular rapesax music with quasi-posi lyrics like I STILL BELIEVE, flames rising at random off of the firebreathing stage, “primitive” style rituals and Tiki torches.  I was still into comic books and Transformers, late-teens were a total brace-faced alien race to me.

-eb

What Should I Write Next?

It occurred to me, this morning, that for the past three years I have been starting stories and novels, starting them and never even coming close to finishing them.  It occurred to me that I have no idea what to write, even though I have gone at a blank page pretending that I did.  This is a few of the unfinished things:

True Jersey, Volume 2: Driveway to Driveway.  I started this in 2006 barely a month after finishing True Jersey, Volume One.  It introduced a new character (Detroit Michigan, that was his name!) and the whole world of Milton, PennJersey felt so much more real and lived in after having written an entire book about it (Vol. 1).  With Vol. 1 I was  never really feeling wholly convinced that it was real, so going at it a second time seemed to validate it.   Vol. 2 was supposed to deal with all the magic/weirdo/Twin Peaksy stuff set up in Vol.1, the kid who drowned and came back as a ghost, the cat who drowned and came back as a spirit cat, and a convoluted series of parallel stories that lead up to a conspiracy about parallel realities.  The premise was this: that every time you had a kind of daydream about a life that you thought you should have been leading by now, it was because you were leading that life, but it was occurring in another reality that was the Actual Reality where you should be, and there were evil forces in the world that had put you in a parallel reality where things weren’t going to turn out the way they were supposed to.  (More on this at the end of this post).

Somewhere in my papers I have the complete list of all the parallels and seeming coincidences that all revolve around the number “11″, which is two parallel lines and thus the representation of two parallel realities.  Detroit, the 11th largest city in America.  The company that Detroit works for is called MotorAway®, which is also a song by Guided by Voices, and his job is to drive cars from one house to another, “driveway to driveway”, which is a Superchunk song, thus a connection, albeit a silly one.  The two driveways can be lined up like two 1’s to make 11, thus taking the one car from one reality to another, inferior reality.  Most of the names and places in the story have the factor 11 in them.  I had never written “puzzles” before, and although a lot of mine were silly (Detroit is known as the Alligator City and the two lls in Alligator also tied into a Crocodile story that…well it just gets sillier and sillier, but I was having fun at the time.)

The other book I wanted to write in 2006 was something I had come up with years before, “Mike and Me”, which was a story about myself, Josh Carr, and (a fictional) Michael Stipe, in the 90’s, in New Jersey.  I wrote a short story version of it in the Dear Loren Letters and then Carrie Miller pitched it as a film in True Jersey, Vol. 1.  About thirty pages into Vol. 2 I decided that there would be some Dear Loren letters in the basement of Detroit’s house in North Milton.  And that would be the Mike and Me story.  I’d put the two stories together.

Of course, the hard drive that Vol. 2’s messy draft was on no longer exists.  Not that I wouldn’t have rewritten it from the bottom up.  If, that is, I decided to write this book.  Which I haven’t.  Here’s the complete list of what is written so far.  Well, not complete.  It’s most of it.  The stuff that when I sat down to write it, I said, to myself, whether I was correct or not: I am writing literature.  Hah.  Anyhow here it is:

1997 – Aero – A Novel

1998 – Aero: Lost Chapters – A Supplement

2000 – Westerners – 6 Short Stories

2001 – The Pilot and the Panda – A Novel.

2004 – The Dear Loren Letters

2005 – A Moveable Feast - Nostalgia and pizza delivery, or how I learned to love the Garden State. (This one actually got published).

2006 – True Jersey, Volume 1 – A Novel

2008 – Cherry Hill – a short story.

Other stuff I have attempted: Northwood.  Draft of a short story, about 3 pages long.  Two men arrive in a town called Northwood and meet a group of other men whose idea of living to the fullest is to make it the longest and the most boring.  By making things boring, you slow down time, so time being longer means life is longer, thus you get the most for your money.  Quantity over quality.  They use payphones instead of cell phones, rent from a video store instead of Netflix, take busses instead of drive cars, et cetera.  Basically, all-analog, no digital, makes life long and slow.  Without someone to text on your phone waiting for a bus, with nothing to read, the wait is longer.  And to these guys, longer is better.  I gave up on the story, it felt contrived and the characters were 2-D.  It was an idea, not a story.

Last Days of Mister President. Was actually writing this while Bush was still the President.  In it, the President has a change of heart in his last few months in office and decides to ride a bicycle across America and he gets really into life, and the idea of Good in the world, and all other kinds of funny revelations.  Most of it is stuff with him sitting at some club in Portland, basically saying what I would say about the state of art or literature in 2008.  In another scene I have him in Mount Laurel, NJ, with Michael Stipe, talking about what the New American Short Story would be.  I wasn’t sure where I was going with the story so…

The New American Novel…so I decided to turn it into the New American Novel, which originally was going to be a memoir and a meditation on the future of American fiction and then became a kind of catch-all for everything I tried to write, or did write, and couldn’t, thus DEFINETELY being about the state of American fiction — mostly my own — and the idea of failure for my generation.  Because I think that nails it, that’s my generation, right now. We’re all in our early thirties and we have our own list like the list above, of all that stuff that we did because we thought it would, well if not make us famous then at least give us jobs.  I mean real jobs, like ok if a guy can be a plumber and raise a family and have a car and a house and all that, why can’t I write a bunch of books and stories, or make a bunch of songs and albums, or paint a bunch of pictures, and have that same modest American lifestyle that I don’t know, I guess that people in their thirties should have?  Because look at us, people.  We all still live in little apartments, in cities.  I mean ok not that we wanted to leave the cities, but the same little apartments ten years later?  Look, I know I’m not alone in thinking it would have been at least a little different.  Anyhow I just let the President story turn into an ideal story about a guy and a girl at a Denny’s which is a retelling of a scene in The Pilot and the Panda which in turn becomes a perfect little story about a girl who lives in a mythical beach town somewhere out of time where the beach is like New Jersey but the buildings are like ancient creacking hotels hundreds of years old and filled with secrets and then it goes into stuff kind of like this post about me talking about the death of the idea that you can sit down and write the Great American Novel and the idea that the New American Novel would be this kind of mess of easy to digest bullets of mini-stories and ideas almost like Youtube videos of text that would be the book I was trying to write before your very eyes.  The book would by form be a failure because that’s essentially what we have learned about a Great American Novel, it aims high and always fails.

But I just can’t write any of these because the above list just got too damn long.  It’s always been my advise to someone who asked me about writing: Never Be An Unpublished Author.  You meet them all the time, that guy at the bar, wasted, pissed, yelling about how he wrote five unpublished novels.  The scary part is, I really think he did write them, but that’s the problem, even if the final one is great, it’s too late, he wrote too many unpublished novels.  It’ll bury you, destroy you with bitterness, turn your hair gray.  Don’t do it.  Don’t write unpublished novels.  Trust me.

But dear God don’t Blog either.

It’s a weird morning when I just don’t even know what the hell I’m trying to tell you, here on the Miltonian, with just text and not a photograph in sight.  I just figured it was about time we had a sit down and, you know, really talked about stuff.  So we’re talking.  Well, I’m asking.  What should I write next?