1. David Curcurito,  Eddie Van Halen: The Esquire Interview (esquire.com, posted 4/17/12). The source material for the Esquire feature provides a few more interesting tidbits on the notoriously press-shy gee-tar god. I call bullshit, though, on Van Halen’s assertion about Roth: “We never really hated each other …We’ve never on a personal level not gotten along.” Anyone with fifteen minutes and either an Internet connection or a copy of Roth’s memoir will see the quote for the bit of Pasadena-style historical revision that it is. It does the ol’ ticker good, however, to see proof of Van Halen’s recovery, both from recurring tongue and throat cancer and from the alcoholism I was convinced would take him eventually. The twin influences of his second wife and his bass-playing offspring have apparently kept him on the straight ‘n’ narrow for the last few years, and the prospect of making more music like the smile-inducin’, Godzilla-stompin’ racket on A Different Kind of Truth could make sobriety stick this time. We can only hope.

2. Renee & Jeremy, A Little Love (One Melody Records, 2012). I hate Coldplay, but I will admit (grudgingly, but I do so much else with a grudge of late, it really doesn’t matter) that I put “Yellow” on a couple mix discs back in, like, 2000 or 2001. Whodathunk it’d be such a great song for kids? Then again, damned near anything Renee Stahl and Jeremy Toback set their voices and instruments to becomes great kindie music. Here, they feast on a plateful of cool folk and rock tunes, both obvious (“Shiny Happy People”) and not so much so. Their run through Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit” is well served by the effortless harmonies that flow out of the pair. John Lennon’s “Love” gets a playful romp that is wholly original in its conception and execution, and Jackie DeShannon’s” Put a Little Love in Your Heart” becomes a languid anthem for the kindergarten set. The only misstep is their take on Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away,” which simply flies too far afield of the original to work (they also chicken out on the “What I got you gotta get it put it in you” line. Boo! I understand, but “Boo!” anyway).

That aside, the record works; Renee & Jeremy aren’t just great kindie artists; they’re a great indie folk duo who I image would make excellent work in whatever genre they choose. A Little Love whets the appetite for another album of originals; right now, though, to hear “Yellow” in a non-Coldplay context is sufficient.

3. Marvel’s The Avengers (Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2012). As a friend noted on Facebook last week, “People sure have a hard-on for superhero movies.” My inner seven-year-old concurs (though I don’t think he would quite use those terms) and joins my outer fortysomething in enjoying the hell out of this orgy of Marvelousness. The non-IMAX 3-D was worthless (if you saw the IMAX, sound off below) but the CGI actually seemed soulful, Downey’s wisecracking Tony Stark was spot-on brilliant (who else is ever going to play that role in the eventual reboot?), and they finally got the Hulk right. The masterstroke, though, is Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the perfect blend of arrogance and evil. And the mid-credits reveal of Thanos as a potential next villain sets things up perfectly for the next brace of sequels—Iron Man 3 (May 2013), Thor 2 (November 2013), Captain America 2 (April 2014), and, if ye gods be with us, another Avengers flick by the time my inner seven-year-old turns ten.

4. “I Am Steve Albini, Ask Me Anything” Reddit Chat (posted 5/8/12). Albini might not be a universally beloved guy, but he has produced one of my favorite albums of this year (Attack on Memory, by Cloud Nothings), one of my favorite albums of the last five years (Manic Street Preachers’ Journal for Plague Lovers), as well as most of my favorite rock album of the last 20 years (Nirvana’s In Utero). Here, he takes on all comers, answering questions both informed and inane, and shares some memories that are quite interesting, and some opinions that are—well, Albinian. Read it.

5. Martha Waggoner, “N.C. OKs Same-Sex Marriage Amendment,”  (time.com, posted 5/9/12); “Transcript: Robin Roberts ABC News Interview with President Obama” (abcnews.go.com, posted 5/9/12); Blerd, “Blerditorial: What Did Gay People Ever Do To You?”  (popblerd.com, posted 5/10/12); Margaret Talbot, “Wedding Bells,”  (newyorker.com, posted 5/14/12). I admit to being ignorant of North Carolina’s Prop 1 until I stumbled upon the Web site of my former parochial school’s parent church. Two weeks before the legislation to write discrimination into the state’s constitution was thrown open to voters, the church’s pastor spent an entire set of Sunday services setting out the supposed Biblical argument for not only denying same-sex couples the legal ability to marry, but even having their non-marriage domestic unions nullified in the eyes of the state. Let me reiterate this—the pastor of a decent-sized church in North Carolina (a tax-exempt entity, mind you) spent the bulk of his pulpit time one Sunday advocating for a law that discriminates against certain citizens. Discrimination. The pastor of a church. And I’ll bet whatever’s in my wallet against whatever’s in your wallet that he was not alone.  ’Twas appalling, but not at all surprising.

I tried for years to reconcile the religion I was taught as a child, with what I, in my heart, knew and somewhat feared I actually believed, or, more to the point, didn’t believe. I was 18 when I turned my back on the church, while still holding out the hope I would regain faith. I was 35 when I finally gave up. The seeds of my loss of faith were sewn during what I typically joke was my period of “incarceration” in the school run by the same judgmental and insufferably self-righteous people who agitated for the approval of Prop 1. The fact that these supposed people of a supposed God worked toward the incorporation of discrimination into state law belies any teaching of their God’s love for his flock, if they even bother to incorporate that into their sermons anymore. I seem to recall a lot more brimstone and torture and retribution in their sermons back in the day.

My issues with religious matters aside, I would have some skin in this fight, due to my relationships with people who would be affected by such legal shenanigans, were they to creep into the constitutions of Pennsylvania (where I live) and elsewhere. My best friend—a man I have known for 25 years, and whom I consider a brother—lives a short drive from where I’m writing this, but had to go to Vermont last year to get married. His husband cannot be seen as more than a “friend” or “significant other” or (their least favorite term) a “partner” (though not in the legal sense) in PA. They two are as perfect for one another as my wife of 17 years and I are for one another, and they deserve to have their marriage recognized wherever they go.

I am emotionally invested when something heinous and overreaching like Prop 1 comes up and is held up as God’s will by religious conservatives and made into law. I am also emotionally invested in the comment by President Obama—in whom so many have invested so much emotion—in favor of same-sex marriage. He sure as hell waited long enough. I tire of hearing about his “bravery” or his “gamble” in an election year; as Margaret Talbot so correctly notes, “One day, not long from now, it will be hard to remember what worried people so much about gay and lesbian couples committing themselves to marriage. And, when that day comes, President Obama’s remarks last week … will seem mild and obvious.” True, for the President of the United States to have your back—to instruct his administration’s Justice Department to refrain from defending the abysmal “Defense of Marriage Act,” for example—is a positive thing. But it seems a lot less like courage when compared to the courage required to be a committed gay couple in North Carolina right now.

I think of my friend, who goes by the nom de Web Blerd, when I consider Prop 1 and what a slithering pile of religious conservatives can do to people they don’t even know, or perhaps even some they do. Or—who knows?—perhaps those religious conservatives themselves have something they wish to hide. “There are a lot of self-loathing homos out there,” Blerd (a gay man) says, “and one need only look at the past 5-10 years in American politics and folks like Ted Haggard to infer that the people who fight the hardest against something are usually doing so to deflect attention away from them doing that exact thing.” Or perhaps they are among the high-profile right-wing mouthpieces—[cough] Limbaugh [cough] Gingrich—who harp on the “sanctity” of marriage, or the “institution” of marriage, while having gone through two or three divorces themselves.

I get angry about the issue, both about the obvious lack of fairness involved, as well as toward the smallest of the small-minded who manage to push that lack of fairness into legal forums (I also get angry at what I presume to be the non-voting majority that can’t seem to make it to the polls when these issues are put to a vote). Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Perhaps it is the eventuality of universally legal same-sex marriage in my lifetime—the ultimate middle finger to the proponents of Prop 1—that I should think about instead. I do think about that from time to time. And I smile.

6. Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Tom Gabel,” (Rolling Stone, 5/24/12 issue). The artist currently known as Laura Jane Grace:

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In 1994, I could boot up my family’s PC, wait around ten minutes for it to warm up and then delve into, of all things, a real estate development simulator that engrossed me for hours as I transformed a humble office building into a mixed-use spire that would put Hancock Center to shame. In 2012, I can boot up my much, much faster PC and play a game that simulates what it’s like to ramp off a cliff on a motorcycle, freefall onto the nose of a fighter jet, ride it into the clouds, hijack it, send it careening into the statue of a dictator and then land unscathed. Video games sure have changed, but in a very strange way the two games I’m referencing resonate with me by connecting with the same set of emotions.

The first game is SimTower, the deceptively simple “computer toy” from 1994 by Maxis, makers of pretty much everything with the term “sim” in the title. The second is Just Cause 2 by Avalanche Studios, released 16 years later. On the surface (and quite far below it), these two games have nothing in common. One puts players in the role of some kind of benevolent Donald Trump figure and the other smashes every action movie cliche into a single experience for a generation raised on cable TV and Mountain Dew. And yet, they both tap into moments of simple pleasure stemming from a bit of elusive realism.

As much time as I’ve spent blowing up whole military installations solo in Just Cause 2, I might have spent a comparably sizable chunk of time tearing down its in-game freeway at high speeds, never once shooting a gun or running down an enemy soldier. In those times, doing anything outlandish or violent would have broken the mood. It was beautiful to hop into a sports car and reach top speed just as the sun slid behind the mountains. In the best moments, it was like I could feel the wind from the back windows, naturally cracked. I could connect with that simulation because, while I’ve never piloted an attack helicopter on a suicide mission against a missile-crazy despot, I have been on a freeway late at night going an inadvisable speed just for the thrill of it.

Likewise, I have never actually been in a massive skyscraper that has offices, a hotel, condos, a movie theater, a luxury restaurant and a freakin’ chapel at the top, but I’ve been in all of those places separately. SimTower is an inherently peaceful game and though it isn’t realistic in its scale or configuration, it taps into true memories with its simulations. It asks players to imagine every office they’ve ever been in by playing a very realistic sound clip of office noise every time an office block is clicked. It asks players to remember the strangeness and excitement of staying in a hotel. Most of all, it asks players to see the wonder of modernity writ large by throwing it all into one place and positing that, money and zoning being no object, doing so in real life might just be plausible.

There aren’t as many “peace” games out there today as there were back in the ’90s. These days, players more often than not have to invent their own peace games within inherently violent games like I did with Just Cause 2. There are a lot of reasons most gaming today is loud and explosion-centric, but mostly I think it’s just that the culture of gaming has merged with the mainstream so weird, little toys like SimTower don’t have room to thrive anymore. There’s some hope in browser, mobile and social games that have players tending a farm or something equally sleepy, but the quiet, even contemplative nature of old games is absent in today’s frantic designs.

Really, this particular nostalgia trip isn’t just about how video games have changed in the past 20 years. It goes deeper than that. Today, technology is loud, social and ubiquitous. In the ’90s, tech was on the margins most of the time. Computers were cold and quiet, their pacing necessarily deliberate for their slow processing speeds. Video games are signs and symbols of information technology as a whole. Games in the 1990s were weird, detached and surreal. Even the ones with guns and bombs were oddly quiet. My nostalgia isn’t for those games themselves. Rather, it’s for the unique experience of technology first learning to attach itself to our lives, our memories of hotels and night time freeway driving, but still being strange to us. It was nothing less than our society’s first contact with alien beings.

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1. WFUV-FM, Saturday, April 28, 4:00PM to 10:00PM. A six-hour wake for the late, great New York DJ Pete Fornatale, spread over the course of his own show (Mixed Bag, guest-hosted by friend/colleague/quasi-protégé Don McGee) and that of longtime compadre Vin Scelsa (Idiot’s Delight). The latter tribute was pure Scelsa—funny, free-form, and moving. It began with a great Peter Falk monologue from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, segued into Simon and Garfunkel’s original “Sound of Silence,” and wound its way through two hours of reminiscence and Fornatale faves (Scelsa didn’t even speak for the first half hour; it was almost as though he were gathering himself).

McGee, though, seemed to channel his friend through 48 songs and several themed mini-sets (a Fornatale specialty). The show opened with a funereal swing through S&G’s “Bookends Theme” (Fornatale had co-authored a book on the album), into James Taylor’s amazing “Enough to Be on Your Way,” into a ten-year-old Poco song (“One Tear at a Time”), into Dylan’s profound “Every Grain of Sand.” It ended with a series of radio-centric tunes (The Ravyns’ “Raised on the Radio,” Rush’s “Spirit of the Radio,” Van Morrison’s “Caravan,” and the Kinks’ “Around the Dial”). Between was a leisurely stroll through songs both classic and contemporary, from the Beach Boys to Springsteen, Phil Ochs and Dion to Aztec Two-Step, deep cuts from Hall and Oates, the Strawbs, and Michael Stanley Band, plus obscurities from acts like Joe Brooks, Mark Roth, and Batdorf & Rodney.

It was like a hole had opened in the time/space continuum of FM radio, letting that Sixties and Seventies free-form magic mingle with tunes in the here and now. WFUV specializes in this stuff, and has some of the old-school masters plying their craft on its airwaves, but on this night, there was something especially unique and touching about the whole endeavor. Somewhere, out in the ether, Fornatale was smiling.

2. Enter the Haggis, “The Basket or the Blade” (from Whitelake, CD Baby, 2012). I assume the imagery of guillotines and beheadings and the like are a metaphor for something a little less medieval—something a little more emotional and universal. No matter; the truly brilliant portion of the song is its building tension in the second verse, and the lift after the second chorus, in which singer Brian Buchanan lets his Bono flag fly and Enter the Haggis, for about 40 seconds, sound like they could reach the nosebleed seats at the local Enormodome, if not the outer reaches of heaven itself.

3. 2012 White House Correspondents Dinner, 4/28/12. I know it’s been going on since, like, the Lincoln administration, but I can’t help but wonder whether this annual dinner/yukfest—dubbed “Nerd Prom” by its fans—has outlived its usefulness, whatever that usefulness might have at one time been. Perhaps journalism students benefit from scholarship monies the thing purportedly raises—good for them. It’s their first lesson in being bought and paid for.

See, as I’ve understood it, it’s the press’ job to hold politicians’ proverbial feet to the proverbial fire and by doing so render them accountable for their actions and shit. It’s not the press’ job to plant their noses firmly up the politicos’ asses and be grateful for the whiff (regardless of what the Bush administration told them), nor is it their job to lap up the Cristal and give high-fives to people whose shoe soles they should be burning. Yeah, I know, I’m a little old-fashioned, a little naïve, hopelessly nearsighted, and possibly quite drunk. But the thing just makes me angry, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office.

So Wolf Blitzer gets to rub elbows with Reese Witherspoon and walk a red carpet like a movie star. Great. Give him a role in the next Legally Blonde movie; it’ll do just as much for his credibility. Or let him admit that the Washington press corps—and, by extension, the White House Correspondents Association—is nothing more than a really bad cast of a really long film with a really shitty script, complete with a Kardashian cameo.

4. Neil Cowley Trio, The Face of Mount Molehill (Naim Jazz, 2012). Cowley’s trio does not play jazz, but a spunky, fun, jazz-like creation with wit and precision, a music that insinuates itself in your head and internal rhythms from the very first listen. It’s an instrumental opiate, from the baby-giggle basis of “Mini Haha” to the epic sweep of “Distance by Clockwork,” to the toe-tapping playfulness of “Rooster Was a Witness.” Listen at your pleasure, or peril. You have been warned.

5. Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011). The subtext of this lauded short novel about memory and family relations is the alternate history one might imagine for oneself, in the absence of any real achievement in one’s life. We read of Nik Kranis, the ne’er-do-well songwriter/bartender brother of the narrator, who constructs just such a history for himself in a 30-year-long diary/multimedia project, in which he casts himself as a misunderstood musical genius and phantom presence in the rock world. He hand-makes his own CDs, writes pseudonymous interviews with and reviews (both positive and negative) of himself and his work. Essentially, he spends decades writing himself into the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, all the while treating his reality (financial, health-wise, and otherwise) as a sideshow he can step into and out of at will.

How many of us have not, at one or another time, imagined a grand fate for ourselves, lived out moments of popular adulation in front of great audiences, all of it in our own heads? Those stadium-rocking daydreams can be momentarily satisfying, and if we’re unable to make them come true, there is little lost but a few moments of time we should have been doing something else. The intrusion on reality is minimal.

Nik’s life’s work reminded me of the Jack Lemmon character in the 1989 film Dad, who suffers from a kind of dementia, in the throes of which he reveals the alternate reality he has been imagining for himself for decades—a different wife, a different occupation, a different family. He had constructed these things in his mind as a kind of joyful retreat, an escape from a life in which he was profoundly unhappy. Similarly, Nik’s retreat into his daydream keeps him alive, keeps him from coming to grips with the promise he had once shown, promise he has been unable to bring to fruition. He is the soul of Stone Arabia, a perfectly hewn character in an imperfect novel, a character that resembles the novel’s readers more than they would probably care to admit.

6. Alex Pareene, “Tucker Carlson’s Downward Spiral” (Salon.com, posted 4/26/12); David Baerwald, Facebook post (date undetermined). Pareene kicks off a new “Hack List” series of least-favorite media figures (it should be subtitled “Great American Douchebags”) with a blow-by-blow takedown of the über-smarmy Carlson, complete with links that support every point with evidence straight from the bowtied fucker’s own mouth and pen. It’s a good read—one worth digging through if you have some time to spend on such a thing, in the interest of reminding yourself why you dislike him so.

You could, conversely, revel in a little snippet from songwriter Baerwald’s Facebook wall, and it’ll only take you a couple seconds. The post has been removed, so I’ll have to reconstruct it from memory. It’s not difficult.  Baerwald is at a party; Carlson is at the same party. Carlson approaches Baerwald.

Carlson [extending hand]: Hi, I’m Tucker Carlson.
Baerwald [withholding hand]: I know who you are.

[end of scene]

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Squeeze gets the audience to their feet during "Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)" at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank. (Photo by Jeff Seesselberg)

What does a somewhat-recently reunited band with a pretty good live album on their hands do after several live tours and a prime spot on the bill at the Coachella Music Festival? It’s not a question you’d typically find yourself asking, so you have to give it up to U.K. pop/rock legends Squeeze for not answering the question traditionally at last night’s show at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ.

If you’ve been to a Squeeze concert since Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook reunited in 2007, you know the scene: a packed audience of pre-Generation X record collectors (with the odd, eager young fan) and slightly graying couples who pogo to “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” just as fervently as they did in 1980. Starry-eyed guys clutch their vinyl copies of East Side Story and girls drink beer while nestling into their partners’ shoulders lovingly. It’s a peculiar but ultimately happy scene befitting one of the more chronically underrated bands of the MTV generation.

Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze: criminally underrated guitarist, man of intriguing facial hair. (Photo by Jeff Seesselberg)

And while that kind of a scene has, in the past, lent itself to a pleasant show running through the band’s greatest semi-hits (“Tempted,” “Black Coffee in Bed,” “Cool for Cats”), the continuously energetic band, set to start recording their first new album in nearly 15 years next month, seems just as interested in pulling surprises from their 22-song bag of tricks. The typical greatest hits were relegated to the tail end of the show, and were preceded by a diverse, often surprising offering of early album cuts and B-sides. Tunes like “In Quintessence” and “Heaven” from East Side Story, “Tough Love” from 1987′s Babylon and On and late-’80s B-side “Who’s That” – a tune Tilbrook introduced as one he’d like to hear Aretha Franklin sing – were as well-rehearsed as “Up the Junction,” “Hourglass” and “Another Nail in My Heart.”

Just as importantly, it’s a delight to see a band that’s earned their keep with old song after old song still enjoying themselves. The grin never left Tilbrook’s newly-bearded face as he engaged in guitar solos, postured with Difford and bassist John Bentley and took to the keyboards for encore number “Up the Junction.” Bespectacled lyricist Difford lent his distinctive lead vocals to “Cool for Cats” and “Heaven,” from East Side Story. The band’s newer members, keyboardist Stephen Large and drummer Simon Hanson, were in top form, with Hanson slamming snares and dramatically tossing stick after stick mid-set.

Opening act The English Beat – consisting of original member Dave Wakeling and a cast of unnamed sidemen – provided a solid if short seven song set, including hits “Mirror in the Bathroom” and “Save It for Later” plus covers of The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” and “Tenderness,” the catchy single from Wakeling’s post-Beat band General Public. Local band River City Extension also provided a spirited set to kick the night off, with Tilbrook sitting in on guitar during the set’s closer.

Squeeze are playing Carnegie Hall in Munhall, PA tonight, April 26; a sold out show in Rams Head in Baltimore on Friday, April 27 and the Roseland Ballroom in New York City on Saturday, April 28.

Set Lists: Squeeze with The English Beat, Count Basie Theatre, Red Bank, NJ – 4/25/2012

The English Beat

I’ll Take You There (Staple Singers cover)
I Confess
The Tears of a Clown (The Miracles cover)
Tenderness (General Public cover)
Ranking Full Stop
Mirror in the Bathroom
Save It for Later

Squeeze

Take Me I’m Yours
If I Didn’t Love You
Tough Love
In Quintessence
Revue
Model
Who’s That
Is That Love
Points of View
Melody Motel
Heaven
Bang Bang
Cool for Cats
Up the Junction
Another Nail in My Heart
Goodbye Girl
Annie Get Your Gun
Hourglass
Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)
———————-
Slap and Tickle
Tempted
Black Coffee in Bed

The Squeeze brain trust, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, with keyboardist Stephen Large. (Photo by Jeff Seesselberg)

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This is the same question that’s dogged Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze for five years. The British duo formed one of the most evocative songwriting partnerships in the post-Lennon-McCartney era, with songs like “Up the Junction,” “Goodbye Girl,” “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” and “Tempted” serving as a light and friendly-sounding but no less powerful dive into the seas of post-punk and New Wave that were making all the tastemakers dance in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Paradoxically, they never enjoyed much chart success in America – their biggest hit was the slickly-produced “Hourglass,” ushered into the Top 20 by a catchy video in 1987 – but, thanks to a spate of licensing opportunities and nostalgia compilation appearances, they’re on the lips of at least 58 percent of anyone who loved the ’80s.

In 2007, after a nine-year split, Squeeze reformed with Difford, Tilbrook and a lineup of old hands (bassist John Bentley, who played on the band’s classic albums, Argybargy (1980), East Side Story (1981) and Sweets from a Stranger (1982)) and new ones (keyboardist Stephen Large and drummer Simon Hanson, from Tilbrook’s backing band) filling out the remainder of the group. The band have toured like clockwork in the years since, releasing a live album in 2007 and Spot the Difference, one of those unfortunate collections of re-recordings a band cuts to compete with their hits, in 2010. (Some copies were packaged with yet another live album, as well.) Now, on the eve of another American tour that will see them performing at Coachella this coming weekend, the band has released their third post-reunion live album, the simply titled Live at The Fillmore, recorded at the iconic San Francisco venue in 2010. Are Squeeze, like so many others, due to collapse under the heavy weight of their own nostalgia?

Happily, this time, the answer is no. Live at The Fillmore is packaged with a few gimmicks and a few surprises, together which make this the best celebration of what makes Squeeze great since they reunited. Part of the success is the presentation: this set is pressed on two vinyl platters, boosting the collectible factor for fans, and noted engineer Bob Clearmountain has mixed the set. So it doesn’t look or sound like the work of a reunited band with only enough resources to put out a semi-decent product.

It also helps that, in their five years on the road, Squeeze has only gotten better. Their standards are performed with a whip-crack urgency, and they know when to deviate from what fans might expect from a typical set. Whether it’s a virtuosic solo from Tilbrook, who, someday, will cease to be seen as an underrated guitarist, or surprise deep cuts sprinkled into the set list (lost classic “If It’s Love” from 1989′s Frank, “Hope Fell Down” from the “lost Squeeze album” Difford & Tilbrook released under their own name in 1985, “Mumbo Jumbo” and “Someone Else’s Bell” from the back end of East Side Story), there’s plenty to rediscover among the songs you’ve committed to memory hundreds of times over.

Squeeze’s transition from underrated legacy act to underrated legacy act with new material may yet take time. Recent promotional materials still indicate Difford and Tilbrook are working on new songs, but they have yet to be heard. (Those same materials also mention a documentary on their career in the works from the BBC, though, which is easy to geek out about.) But if Squeeze is going to spin their wheels with a live set as fun as this one, it’s hard to complain.

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A typical summer night in the 90s

I love weird pop culture. I’m not talking about “so bad it’s funny/good” weird, but genuinely bizarre stuff that belongs in its own, special, thoroughly un-ironic corner of human artistic expression. It’s valuable both as a consumer and critic of pop culture to have a background in the weird stuff because it puts more mainstream content in perspective. For example, the mind-bending perceptual experimentation of Inception doesn’t look so bizarre or off-putting when you’ve spent a night watching a movie from mainland China in the 1980′s about a child who has vaguely Buddhist mystical powers and a sidekick who is basically a stranger he met on a train who may or may not have microwaved and ate shit early in the film’s proceedings.

How I experienced such oddities is as important as the specifics of the oddities themselves. See, I had the good fortune to grow up in the glorious cultural window of the 1990s. Let me elaborate:

By the 1990s, cable was firmly established but the concept of a 24-hour, consistent programming schedule hadn’t yet been implemented. The Internet was around but it didn’t really carry much video and the little video it had was brief and low-quality. The result was a cable television landscape that essentially transformed into the weirdest place in reality after midnight, catering to the insomniacs, stoners and weirdos who would eventually migrate to the infinite supply of entertainment of high-speed Internet the next decade. In the 90s it seemed like every TV network gave late night programming responsibilities to a creepy, bug-eyed guy who worked in a closet at the corporate HQ. Basic cable would trot out its collection of old, forgettable pulp films, premium stations filled the waves with softcore porn, obscure horror and foreign detritus, even the music stations trotted out a mix of emergent electronic music and deep cuts from alternative rock bands.

I’ve always been a night person. As I write this, it’s nearly 3:30 AM Pacific and I’m bright-eyed. I was like this as a kid, too. So, come school break, I turned nocturnal and immersed myself in the wanton weirdness of late night TV. It was a grab bag that I couldn’t control or predict. Titles meant nothing and the late hour meant I was completely unsupervised. Thus, bizarre movies from mainland China, various iterations of Emmanuel and purposely off-putting music videos from the likes of Rammstein, Aphex Twin and Dirty Vegas. I never would have found this stuff on my own, not even in the stacks of a scuzzy video store. TV had to give it to me in the wee hours.

By the 00s the weirdness of late night TV basically disappeared. Cable had accrued enough original programming to fill 24 hours with middling crime procedurals, MTV and VH1 jumped on the reality TV bandwagon and premium stations adopted an all-reruns, all-the-time policy that persists into the modern day. TV isn’t where to go for weird anymore.

Thankfully, the Internet is a vast and stormy sea of weird. Clicking around Wikis, aggregators and forums is the equivalent of channel surfing, only with a higher degree of personal agency. Programs like Net Nanny curtail the degree of weirdness a kid can find, or at least until the kid learns how to circumvent the censorship. I admit I’m nostalgic for the days of TV’s unbidden bizarreness, but I know each generation has its own thing. Indie theaters, cavernous book stores, random pamphlets, underground newspapers– They’re all sources of weird throughout the history of pop culture. One way or another, a kid needs to have that strange fruit to fuel creativity and open-mindedness.

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Look upon Pete Campbell's period suit and tremble!

“I don’t really care about work. I care about you.”

That, you incredibly patient fans of Mad Men, is not the only lie Don Draper tells over the course of the first two episodes of Season 5, but it is the biggest one. You see, the patron saint of bad ideas has decided to make his hastily married second bride a low-level designer in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce creative department, either because he has an incredible blind spot to the poisonous environment of his workplace or because he’s actively trying to sabotage his latest stab at happiness. Hell, it’s probably both, but that’s why we watch this show. That and the essential snippets of humor that keep the devastating proceedings of each episode from being the world’s biggest downer.

Yes, it has been a year and a half since Mad Men last aired a new episode and now that it’s finally back it spends 93 minutes reminding us that all of its characters are unhappy people with incredibly interesting lives that exist at the mercy of social change they ironically can’t predict. Most of “A Little Kiss” parts one and two focus on the internal struggles of the people we’ve been following faithfully on Mad Men for years now, but something bigger looms around the margins. Throughout the double-stuffed premiere, SCDP plays a joke on a competing ad agency that got into hot water for mistreating a protest by black civil rights activists. Roger takes out an ad in the newspaper that refers to his company as an “equal-opportunity employer” and everybody has a nice laugh over it in their lily-white office on Madison Avenue. By episode’s end, reception is full of black applicants who, understandably, aren’t in on the private joke. The lesson? There are consequences to every action, even when everyone on the playing field is kind of a cad, and the ever-changing world won’t stand for it.

Really, that’s the overarching message of “A Little Kiss”. It’s clear that Matthew Weiner et al were cognizant of the fact that their show has been off the air for what amounts in TV time to an epoch, so a lot of the premiere is dedicated to reintroducing audiences to the characters and circumstances of the series. A little time has passed since the end of Season 4 but the same problems persist. Roger is still a conniving alcoholic who is losing his sales prowess, Pete is still a dangerously ambitious man-child, Peggy is still the most under-appreciated genius to ever become a professional cynic and Don…

…oh, Donald “Dick Whitman” Draper, when are you not a mess? When last we left our anti-hero he had crawled from the depths of addiction to reclaim his perch on the precipice of addiction just long enough to marry a lovely young woman he really didn’t know at all because, yes, she demonstrated the patience of an adult when his children spilled a milkshake in public. Today, he’s doing his best impression of happy while sewing the seeds of his and other people’s discontent. Megan, Don’s bilingual and endlessly sexual trophy wife, throws him a surprise party for his 40th birthday, then proceeds to fill the evening with a nightmare scenario of embarrassing coworkers and inappropriate singing.

Of all the plots introduced or reintroduced in “A Little Kiss”, Don’s shaky but not-all-terrible marriage is the most divisive and yet most compelling. As much as I (and I’m sure plenty of other viewers) root for Joan to find the appreciation she deeply deserves but can never find, and as much as we get a kick out of Lane’s awkwardness and Harry Crane’s infinite supply of douchebaggery, Don is still the main character. The episode does a good job of justifying Don’s new life with Megan and not just making it Roger & Jane Part 2. Megan is trying and she’s no naif, but she’s not prepared for the rotten foundation of the entire advertising industry into which she married. Her emotional wreck of a husband, despite his sales pitch at the end of the episode, cares deeply about work. He just has a hateful, co-dependent relationship with his coworkers and, as the party demonstrates, he has literally no other friends. From a critical perspective as much as a fan perspective, I want to see Season 5 of Mad Men do something new and interesting with Don and Megan. Ripping them apart early would just be wheel-spinning and their pathos-laden relationship makes for good drama.

Also, Don’s new apartment is insanely gorgeous and I’m not keen to see it turn into a ruinous bachelor den any time soon.

So, despite the long hiatus and the budding careers of the show’s ridiculous number of breakout stars, Mad Men has still got it. Rejoice, you cable-watchers and downloaders, the preeminent cable drama is back.

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Two relatively interesting things happened on NBC this week. The Office finally closed out its Florida arc by dragging most of the subplot’s principal characters back to Scranton and Community returned after a long, nervous hiatus. Coincidentally and with two different conclusions, both shows explored the same issue: How do we reconcile the paths life provides to us?

I think the answer both shows reach is a reflection of the core sentiments the shows represent. Furthermore, I believe these sentiments explain why Community is struggling to justify a fourth season despite a small but fervent fanbase and The Office is trudging along through to a guaranteed 9th season. In essence, Community is a comedy of hope and joy while The Office has long retained its core of sadness and desperation.

Since this column has been about The Office, I’ll start there. “Get the Girl” relegates the last of the Florida arc to the B-plot as Andy arrives in Tallahassee to win back Erin, who has remained there after the Sabre store project in a bid to start a new life. After a fun smattering of scenes that play mostly as speedy scenarios geared for laughs instead of actual storytelling, the two star-crossed goofballs reunite and drive back to Scranton in love out of nowhere. Satisfying? Not in the least, but when has the Andy/Erin plot ever been about depth?

The main plot of the night involves Nellie’s sudden appearance in Scranton with the intention of taking the manager’s job. Lucky for her, Andy is MIA and Robert California is more interested in being amused by these strange “hu-mans” than running a proper business. Through manipulation and luck, Nellie wins over everyone in the office except for Jim.

(a small aside: I actually like that Jim has become principled all of a sudden. He stood up to Cathy, saved Dwight’s job and resists Nellie’s coup when nobody else does. It makes sense for a father of two and a man who has found meaning even in a seemingly meaningless existence. Let’s hope the show keeps him on this path).

Ultimately, Nellie wins the day and leaves us with a chilling outro. She explains her unlikely rise to the manager’s position by asserting that American business and even the American dream is entirely random. Throughout the episode, different characters propose different reasons for why things are the way they are in life. Some say it’s survival of the fittest, others admit that it’s all relative to one’s circumstances. Even Toby, who tries to pass himself off with the somewhat slicker name Tony, thinks it’s really all about appearances. But the episode leaves us with this idea that, in the end, it’s all random and pointless. That idea has been hanging over The Office since the beginning and we’ve taken humor from the absurdity of this nihilism or from the defiance of others against it. I’m still not thrilled with Season 8, but at least episodes like “Get the Girl” suggest the writers are really thinking about larger themes going into Season 9.

Community comes at things from a different angle. Every character in “Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts” spends some time despairing over the seeming inevitability of their inborn identities. By the end, though, they all find an unexpected path to a happier, more fulfilled place by learning from one another. This is the default mode for Community, even if it isn’t afraid of going to darker territory.

But comedy isn’t about feeling good, ironically. Comedy is about identifying absurdity and facing upsetting things with a laugh. Sometimes it’s a laugh of recognition, other times it’s a laugh of relief. Community may be more fun than The Office, but it exists in a different world than the one in which we live. In the world of Greendale Community College, things always work out and people find their better angels. At Dunder-Mifflin/Sabre, life is a sea of pointless gray punctuated with moments of unnoticed absurdity. The Office plugs into something unpleasant about life, like the seeming randomness of power structures, and forces us to gaze at it unblinking for 22 minutes a week. It may not always work as art or as entertainment, but damned if it isn’t affecting.

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I may step on some critics’ toes for this statement, but I believe film will always be at least a little more respectable than television. It’s not because film attracts an inherently higher caliber of actor or is inherently better at creating strong characters, only that film has a stronger obligation to the creation of a proper story. Barring the tendency to churn out sequel after sequel of a profitable blockbuster, films are made with the understanding that they have to come to a satisfying conclusion in order to tell a good story. Characters have to change, as do circumstances and overall tone. Something has to happen between beginning and end. Television, on the other hand, is less subservient to the inevitable end. The temptation is always there to set up another season, to keep the viewers coming back to see the things they’ve loved since the beginning of the show. This is the impetus of the reset button, that tendency to end every televised plot arc with a return to the status quo. TV shows, especially long-running, episodic ones, change at a glacial pace, if at all. The thing that has made The Office‘s Florida arc interesting is the possibility that it might just change things in a meaningful way. That’s why “Last Day in Florida” is a disappointing episode even if it’s not terribly flawed on its own.

The A-plot is fairly simple: Robert California has always hated the Sabre store idea but felt compelled to see it through because Jo, the original CEO, endorsed it, giving it good will with the company brass. Now that the store has been tested, he can deem it a failure and move on. The problem, of course, is that he has to pass the blame to an expendable employee. In this case, Dwight is on the chopping block. The episode doesn’t directly explain how Nellie isn’t in the crosshairs as well, but it has been established in the past that she has friends in high places and her job title (president of special projects) could potentially connect her to other parts of the company where she’s more useful. Dwight doesn’t know he’s taking the fall and won’t listen to Jim when Robert confides in the latter about his plans. Cue an extended bit of physical comedy as Jim literally wrestles with Dwight to keep him from entering the Meeting of Doom.

The logic at play here is fairly flawed, as it hinges on Nellie naming Todd Packer the VP when Dwight doesn’t show at the meeting. I’d like to think Jim would be smart enough to know this, or at least that the writers would take the time to explain Jim’s irrationality by underlining his weird, co-dependent relationship with Dwight. Ah, but that’s a small concern in light of the larger disappointment that is the inevitable return to business as usual. Packer takes the fall, Dwight is disappointed but still employed and everyone but Erin goes back to Scranton. Heck, even Ryan is back in town despite his dramatic, soul-searching exit last week.

The Office showrunner Paul Lieberstein recently gave an interview that shed some light on the show’s troubled 8th season. As much as I, as a fan and a critic, wanted the Florida arc to be about shaking up the staleness of the series, it seems that it was always more about spinning its wheels in an exotic locale. Lieberstein had little more than faint praise for Season 8 and focused on promises for Season 9. Though there’s still one more episode left in the Florida arc, it’s going to be about Andy’s quest to get Erin back from the nice old lady who’s currently employing her. It might be fun, even if it’s entirely rote, but it’s almost guaranteed to not be a big change. The most we’d lose is Ellie Kemper, which wouldn’t be a change for the better. More likely than not, Erin comes back with Andy and nothing really changes.

Perhaps it’s my last lingering shreds of hope and good will, but I’m still willing to give The Office a chance to do something interesting. That said, I’m fairly certain (and apparently so is Paul Lieberstein) that Season 8 isn’t where it’s going to happen. Florida could have been great, and at times it was, but it didn’t actually give The Office the shot in the arm it desperately needs.

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In this third episode of “Popdose Presents: Songs of Freedom”, Matthew Bolin and Lyana Fernandez focus on MTV: the role of politics in its history and programming, and about the politically motivated artists who have been a part of its history, both inclusive and as critics.

Special focus is given to the “peak” years of the channel’s involvement in the political process (approximately 1988-1994): How the hiring of former Rolling Stone journalist Kurt Loder in the later 1980′s changed their image; how the 1992 election made them (for a moment) a possible political influence on the national landscape; and, how shifting demographics, ownership by Viacom, and a dependence on reality-based programming eventually removed most traces of both politics, and then music itself from the network. Included in this portion is talk of how the shift away from music led to first the addition of other related television channels, and then the creep of non-video, non-music, and eventually reality-dependent programming across all their channels.

In addition, they discuss how the homogenous programming style they currently have parallels a similar sameness in much of the videos that have been played on the channel (especially in its early years); the difference between the original U.S. MTV and its sister channels across the globe, especially in the area of politics; and, whether the network is currently undergoing another change-or crisis of conscience-that may (slowly) affect how they portray themselves and their relationship with both politics and music moving forward.

NOTE FROM MATTHEW: At one point in the episode, I recall off the top of my head that Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album had sold between twelve and fifteen million copies. Turns out that it sold nine million….just in the United States. Worldwide, it has sold to date around thirty million copies worldwide, and as of this week is still the sixth biggest selling album in the history of the British charts (though Adele’s 21 is likely to push it to seventh sometime in the next few months).

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Popdose Presents: Songs of Freedom — EPISODE THREE (1:12:55, 66.8 MB)

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Playlist– Here’s a selection of songs by artists discussed in this episode, and other tunes related to the episode’s subject matter:

Calibretto 13 – Why Can’t I Be On MTV? from Adventures in Tokyo (2002)

The Clash – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais from The Clash (U.S. Version) (1977)

Dead Kennedys – MTV Get Off the Air from Frankenchrist (1985)

Deep Purple – MTV from Rapture of the Deep (Special Edition) (1986)

Dire Straits – Money for Nothing from Brothers in Arms (1985)

John Mellencamp – Pop Singer from Big Daddy (1989)

Nirvana – Serve the Servants from In Utero (1993)

R.E.M. – Losing My Religion from Out of Time (1991)

The Replacements – Seen Your Video from Let it Be (1984)

U2 – With or Without You from The Joshua Tree (1987)

Neil Young – This Note’s For You from This Note’s For You (1988)

Frank Zappa – Be in My Video from Them or Us (1984)

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Matthew Bolin can be contacted on Twitter @Hadrians_Dad. Lyana Fernandez can be contacted @lolitapop9. Comments as well as topic/song suggestions are welcomed.

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