Running With Scissors

Once Upon A Time in Sydney... 

Back in the 1980s when we didn't have anything like the internet, we really had to make our own entertainment. This is why we formed bands or formed up in groups to go watch movies together or played Dungeons and Dragons. It's what we did in those days and it wasn't even particularly cool.  

We were probably an earnest, callow bunch in most respects, and we seemed to do a lot of driving around at night.  Looking back on it, it seems incredibly dumb but also quite energetic. We were full of beans and we'd drive around, just cruising and talking about things - deep and meaningful things as we used to call them - and generally kill time waiting to be entertained in some way. I think about it now and most of my memories of those times are night time jams and conversations and games and pizza parlours. 

Phil, who is a respected doctor now, used to have this Alfa Sud. He knew how to drive it too because he grew up in one of those wealthy families that let their kids race go-karts so he had this racer's instinct for taking corners hard. I remember sitting in the passenger seat as he drove me home in the middle of the night with nobody else on the road, the Alfa Sud engine roaring through the leafy 'burbs. It was pretty anti-social when I think about it now; but also a kind of quintessential Gen-X experience.  

Phil looks after dying people now in palliative care. He sure doesn't drive like that today. 

Come And Join The Fun!

RIP Eddie Van Halen (1955 - 2020)

So Much Larger Than Life

I've been trying to write something about Eddie for some days as you know. 

I wish it were as simple assuming up career highlights and noting his impact on the playing of rock guitar and then emote some grief. It would be like that if his life and times and career were like any other musician, but that's not quite true. And even with the dimension fo grief, I find it hard to express what exactly that we can articulate about a man who was fighting a losing battle against throat cancer while continuing to smoke. It's hard. 

Yet I'd like to start there. When famous people die and their careers are done, you can look upon their works and measure up their careers. With Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, you know they were mid-flight when the folly of overdosing removed them service, so to speak. You can't quite say the same thing about Eddie Van Halen. It's been apparent since the double live album of 2015 that there might not be any more new albums coming from the band. 2012's 'A Different Kind of Truth' was in effect the final statement from a career that spanned 12 studio albums and 2 double live discs. His entire oeuvre was in the rear mirror as he lay dying. And even though 65 is much too young, it is hard to imagine there was going to be anything he would do to revolutionise guitar playing once more. 

Perhaps the coming years we will get releases from the vault of materials he was recording in disown private comforts at his own studio. For now, we are left with the 12 studio albums and 2 live albums. There is an almost symmetry in that the 12 albums can be split into 6 with David Lee Roth and 5 with Sammy Hagar, with the lone album with Gary Cherone. There is a live album each with Hagar and Roth respectively, and if their Sydney concert was anything to go by, there would be in the vaults somewhere a concert video with Cherone.

The point is, he wasn't exactly felled, mid-career like the 27 club - and we are much better off for it. It was a full and vibrant career made up mostly of high points and a few dud songs. If you were a kid in the 'burbs wishing upon a career as a rock star, you couldn't draw it up much better. If you add in his impact on the playing style, which is still reverberating through the guitar playing community, and his place in the history of rock guitar, it was a splendid career. And we are grateful he came along. 

So Vale, to the King of Rock Guitar.

That Moment We First Heard Eruption

Being in Australia, my first encounter was rather late. Back in early 1982, for us, Heavy Metal was still a peculiar sub-sub-genre of Hard Rock which was a sub-genre of Rock which had finally broken through to the mainstream with the advent FM Radio in Australia. The guy who introduced me to Van Halen was this guy who would later be known as 'Sandy' Vahadani in this band. At the time I was getting a lot of input in the schoolyard from various friends wanting me to listen to this that and the other thing - of course that's kind of how I got into most of the bands I still love and cherish. 

Sandy was always armed with Heavy Metal magazines of artists giving interviews in their spandex pants, posing and preening like wankers-from-outer-space. Sandy wanted to be one but he didn't exactly look the part. He flung me a cassette of Van Halen 1. He prodded the cover notes written in his loopy-jagged cursive with his hairy muscular index finger and said "make sure you listen to this, man". Dutifully, I took the thing home and listened that evening and it promptly blew my mind. 

I had had experiences with records blowing my mind, but nothing sounded quite like Van Halen. You could hear the boundaries of rock guitar being redefined. If the goal posts were moving by feet with every great rock album, the goal posts had suddenly moved to the horizon with the advent of Van Halen. 

This was, to borrow a phrase from Ted Templeman who produced their early albums, a generational talent.     To this day I can say with 100% confidence nothing has shattered and re-defined the boundaries of music quite like 'Van Halen I' with 'Eruption' as its piece de resistance. I've heard impressive, amazing, jaw-dropping players since but none of them have mapped an entire continent of playing like Eddie Van Halen did. 

Tapping As A Way of Life

There are many great guitar players - but there really is only one player who defined the guitar sound for a generation. The cultural power of Eddie transcended rock. It permeated the whole attitude of what it meant to be a guitar player. His playing demonstrated that everything matters. Technique matters; Intent matters; feel for the material matters; your understanding of the music you are playing matters; your equipment matters; the very coils of wire in your pickups around what kind of magnets matters; the voltage going into your tube amplifier matters. And when you summed up the total of all the things that mattered, guitar playing mattered, like never before.

When I was working my summer job at Dickson's Music in Chatswood around 1984-1985, every kid coming in to check out guitars was attempting to emulate Van Halen's two-handed tapping technique. There has been much spilled ink about the origins of the technique and whether Eddie Van Halen really did 'invent' it, but needless to say he was the man who made it part of the vernacular of guitar playing in the 1980s onwards, and it cannot be understated. 

In 1985, the fictional Marty McFly was tapping on his electric guitar in 'Back to the Future' and even tortures his father with a cassette recording labelled 'Edward Van Halen'. The sequels of overtones and howls of feedback melding into a cacophony of true 1980s Guitar-isme. And at that point the whole Van Halen thing was coopted into a schtick. It marks a denouement in the moment of all rock music where Hollywood abducted the power and turned it into a culture nicknack. All the same, in one of the best movies of all time, there is a deeply embedded imprint of Eddie Van Halen - the moment we can understand the cultural significance of that playing style. 

RIP Eddie Van Halen - you will always be an inspiration to every kid who picks up an electric guitar. 

'Stranger Things'

80's Nostalgia

You know, it is really strange that I spent the 80's waiting for it to be over. I had a good time, and I was still this miserable son--of-a-so-and-so because the things that were happening didn't seem all that exciting. Maybe it was because on some level the 70's NYC experience was so much more formative than the 80's Sydney experience. All I know is that I've had this feeling of trying to find my way back to a feeling I had when I was younger. A fleeting moment here, a remembered emotion there. We all grow up even when we resist it as hard as us Gen-X have tried; time marches on inexorably and the inevitable crust and barnacle forms on your soul. You forget who you were a long time ago, even when you feel like you haven't changed all that much.

And then you discover other people are trapped by the past as well. The past is haunting. It's never what you remember it to be, and it's even weirder when you see somebody else's fiction about it. 'Stranger Things' is exactly that kind of TV series that evokes a lot and makes you remember the things you once yearned for, but it also reminds you of what is no longer there. It's funny, but it's also deeply tragic.

Spoiler alert, because it would be unfair if I didn't tell you now.


What's Good About It

It's like watching a mash-up of 80s movies. There are moments that come straight out of things like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.', while other moments are snatched from 'The Thing' and 'Gremlins' with a deep nod to 'Alien'. The whole thing is made up of fiction piled one on top of the other. The references in the dialogue echo 'Star Wars' and 'The Empire Strikes Back' while the tropes of a sleepy town Sheriff going on a search in to the woods is Stephen King. Somehow it all stays together without spinning out of control.

Indeed, the series is full of homages to films long past. Even 'The Wizard of Oz'. Eleven is Dorothy in a strange Oz and the boys are respectively Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Lion. When they walk along the train tracks in search of the Gate to theVale of Shadows, the quartet echo the quartet of 'Stand By Me', who walked along the rail tracks. When the kids are on the run from government agents' cars, as they ride their bicycles, they are Elliot and E.T. - but instead of them flying over blockades, Eleven flips a government van instead. At one point Sheriff Hopper finds himself in the Vale of Shadows, looking into a going husk of a large egg, a clear visual homage to 'Alien' - and he should know better than to peer in because Alien came out in 1979.

The kid actors are great in this series. There is nothing to top the sense of adventure in adolescence and the domain of the mind. It is a potent combination of intuition and imagination. The entire series of events hinges on the understanding the kids have of otherworldliness. Much like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.' before it, the adventure centre around the concept of the world as seen from kids. They're very well cast, not for them are the good looking boys of Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, of 'Stand By Me'. This bunch looks more likely as future candidates of Frank Zappa's band where ugly was not a problem.

David Harbour's Sheriff Hooper is strongly reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's look in 'The Shining', which adds to to the Stephen King thing going on. There are plenty of 80s tropes to pick at and laugh about so it's generally mirthful.

What's Bad About It

I wouldn't say it's bad, but I did wonder about Winona Ryder's performance. She's the lone actor in this series that comes with a high profile even though she's been out of the headlines since her days as the 90s It Girl for creepy movies. You take one look at her and you know it's all a certain kind of fiction, and it makes harder the wilful suspension of disbelief.

I waster so I can spot the anachronism well enough. Most of the production design is spot on but the wardrobe and makeup lapse into problems. Just because it's satin 1983 doesn't mean everything is from 1983, at the same time, the most likely things to be up to date are teen fashion and makeup, and there are some clunkers there. The blue eyeshadow here, the wrong kind of hairdo there, it's the little  things that occasionally poke out as being not quite right.

What's Interesting About It

It's actually quite Proust-ian with a Gen-X makeover. Instead of a madeira cake that evokes a lifetime of memories, it's a lifetime of memories tugged at through the idiosyncratic counterculture of kids. Instead of the whole story strung along on great themes of literature, it's strung up along Dungeons and Dragons. The monster in question comes straight out of the pages of 'the Monster Manual', it is the Demogorgon - and I must add it is one of my favourite monsters in the Manual:

Yes, that's him the Prince of Demons, and while the monster doesn't look like that in this series, it is unmistakably of Dungeons and Dragons. Why does one like certain monsters in the Monster Manual? I know my DM loved Owlbears, the "product of cruel genetic experiments" as per the Monster Manual. The rich Gary Gygax text provides hours of interesting meditation on civilisation. Somehow it is informing the abstract in this series.

This isn't 'Hook' where Spielberg condescends to understanding the culture of Gen-X kids - this is how the other kids not Elliott were living 1983.

Government Conspiracies

The show leans heavily on the conspiracy theories, and giving them more credence than one normally would. But here's the thing: Conspiracy Theorists rightly or wrongly get ridiculed. The problem with that is ridiculing Conspiracy Theorists is exactly what the CIA want you to do. The truth is, whether you believe it or not, the US government has always been doing things in secret involving lots of people. That, is the working definition of conspiracy so, it's not surprising it spawns speculation.

One of the more out-there bits of conspiracy theory way back when was that the US Government was secretly manufacturing the LSD that found its way into the West Coast counterculture. This is a claim that was documented at the time, and even Philip K. Dick uses it in 'A Scanner Darkly' as the central plot problem that gets uncovered by protagonist Bob Actor. Of course, it turned out MKULTRA was real, and the CIA were experimenting with LSD on people for purposes mind control.

This a certainly level of discomfort watching the bits to do with the Government agency running crackpot experiments on kids, but at the same time what would the world fiction be without governments doing nefarious experience on people? Information was hard to come by in the 1980s. It was easy for governments to keep people in the dark. The discomfort of watching it was a reminder that when sitcoms to the flow of information, maybe the 80s were closer to the dark ages than the current internet age.

The character of Eleven is far-fetched, but not as far fetched as we might have believed 1983.

Paranoia Has A Name And It Is Lando Calrissian

At the business end of the story when the boys go in hiding from government agents and they are contacted by Sherif Hopper, they immediately suspect the Sheriff has been compromised. They base this on the part of 'The Empire Strikes Back', where Lando Calrissian betrays his friends Han and Leia to Darth Vader. It's an interesting construction because the kids are right to suspect. They quote the Star Wars mantra "I have a bad feeling about this", and then make a leap of faith to trust Sheriff Hopper.

The world around the boys is filled with ambiguity in a way that Dungeons and Dragons eschews. In D&D, the world is divided into alignments, and the alignments dictate one's actions. The strange blurring of Government into what can only be described evil affects not only the boys but even the adults around them. The reference Lando Calrissian then is not just about betrayal, but the undecidability in the face of ambiguity.

The Rule Of Law And The Adventurer's Code

At one point the gang falls apart in dissension. It is the toothless boy Dustin who re-asembles the group by the dint of the adventurer's code and the strict adherence to the code, stating it is the Rule of Law. It's actually a strangely moving moment. Dustin cites the times the party is preyed upon by monsters simply because they did not stick together. Sticking together a the party is how to survive adventures. Splitters perish. The lessons of the game inform Dustin's forceful argument that Mike offer the hand of peace to Lucas. When Mike refuses to countenance, Dustin thunders it is the Rule of Law, that he who draws first blood in conflict must atone for the act first.

What's interesting is that Dungeons of Dragons does provide players with this insight. Carnies should stick together for the same reason parties should stick together. Disunity is, as the ALP found out, death. Certainly Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten et al. would have benefited greatly from this wisdom, and tarred and feathered Tony Burke.

If there are two observations to be made about what Dungeons and Dragons offers players is the insight that life is speculative and statistical, while our response to it needs to be tempered impartial as the law dictates. Sticking to party its rules saves lives in the game. Sticking to the impartiality of the rule before law renders possible all the things we hold dear.

It is therefore the crowning moment of the series when the three boys reconcile themselves and with Eleven. It is about as profound as anything in the annals of literature. The party should always stick together.

The Music

Gee y'know? That's exactly the music that made the 80s musically unbearable. Little did I know back then that things were only going to get worse. :)

The faux John Carpenter synth music as the theme however, is nothing but unmitigated coolness.


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Movie Doubles - 'Hot Tub Time Machine' & 'Better Off Dead'

1980s Nostalgia, Generation X Wasteland

O-o-o-okay. Today's movie doubles links two films through the prism of John Cusack movies, skiing, and the 1980s. Since 'Hot Tub Time Machine' explicitly goes back to 1986, it started to ring bells in my head. The more obvious doubles partner for 'Hot Tub Time Machine' - 'HTTM' from here - would have been 'Back to the Future' which kicks off in 1985 and talked about 1980s teen mores in the present tense as it happened, as opposed to 'HTTM' which looks back and wonders in nostalgia. Not coincidentally, both films feature Crispin Glover, and in both films he is transformed by the adventure undertaken by the time travelers.

Still, the reason I dug up 'Better Off Dead' is because it too hails from 1985, also stars John Cusack and seems like a good point to understand just what it is that the 1980s were about in real time as opposed to nostalgia. In that sense I thought it might open up a more interesting vein of discussion than simply comparing two time-travel texts. The other thing is that 'HTTM' just isn't a good a film as 'BTTF' and I didn't want to get bogged down in the inferiority of 'HTTM' when I could be digging up some interesting ideas by comparing it to something in its own weight class.

Snow And Ski

The 1980s the 'HTTM' crew go back to is more a parody of the 1980s than an attempt to recreate a proper look. If you want a proper look, you get closer watching 'BOD'. It really is the snow and ski experience that links the film and in each instance the snow forms the test of character for John Cusack's characters.

'HTTM' is a little disappointing in that the test of snow is largely metaphorical whereas in BOD, his character has to conquer his fear and ski down a dangerous mountain. The physicality of the task actually comes off a lot better than the metaphor of John Cusack's character Adam's frozen emotions in 'HTTM'. By watching these two films together, you get the feeling that these John Cusack characters have lost a lot of dynamism in the intervening years, and it's a bit of a shame.

The Cold War And Reagan

I've written about this elsewhere but the quintessential Gen-X experience was the fear of Ronald Reagan pushing the button to turn the Cold War into a Hot War of Mutually Assured Destruction. Thus it is no surprise that in going back to the 1980s, the 'HTTM' characters end up in the cold. They are pretty explicit about this when they arrive in 1986 and the news on the TV screen shows Ronald Reagan.

The paranoia also informs the plot as the villain Blaine is motivated in stopping the 'HTTM' crew because he was inspired by 'Red Dawn' and suspects the 'HTTM' crew are Russian spies. What's remarkable is how much the villain character of Blaine - a garden variety alpha male jock bully - is just like the villain from 'BOD', Roy Stalin. Get that surname? Yes, the Cold War paranoia was rampant enough that the bully kid's surname being Stalin didn't strike anybody as weird.

It is thus a bit of an irony that the means by which the 'HTTM' crew can return to the present is by reacquiring a can of some weird Russian caffeine-boosted soft drink. It seems America is much less worried about Russia today because they've joined the consumerist system, but they are worried now about the competition they're getting from them.

If Gen-X is not too worried about the War on Terror, it's because they learned not to be too worried about the Cold War.

The Gen-X Conundrum


'BOD' features John Cusack's teen protagonist Lane Meyer with David Ogden Stier (Charles from the TV series of MASH) as his conservative father. They seem to be a well to do family living near a ski resort town. The central conflict between father and son centre around the broken down communication between the generations that was so common in the 1980s. After the tumultuous 1960s and chaotic 1970s, the narrative of the alienated teenager had set itself into a pattern, and in 'BOD' we see signs of formalising these relationships. Clearly it's an attempt to re-assemble the meaningful bits of society that make sense to his character but the comedy lies in the futility.

The film has one particular exchange where Lane's father attempts to talk to his son from cribbed notes on juvenile lingo. It's an excruciating scene even after all these years. What seems to be happening is not so much independence as an absence of adult supervision for kids which is refreshing as it is novel to watch.

The absence of adult supervision is a theme that is revisited in 'HTTM', but this time the characters are wondering how it is that their lives turned into such a mess. The mirroring of meaning is stark. The kids of the 1980s made themselves away from their parents, but in making themselves they have become stilted and unfinished. Yet, when looking back it is obvious the parents couldn't have been there when the world was changing so fast. Gen-X made itself into what it is - i.e. we made ourselves the way we are, that's why we're so fucked, but there wasn't much else choice about it.

Going Back In Time To Fix ...What Exactly?

There are 2 rough genres of time machine stories predicated on where they choose to go. If you choose to go to the far future, then it's all new and amazing but from a story-telling point of view you're better off making a film simply set in the future and remove the expediency of having to explain  time machine in your story.

The alternative is go into the past and face the "grandmother dilemma". Invariably time travel stories to the past face the problematic of what happens if you change anything, and should you try to recreate the past or not. This is what connects 'HTTM' to 'BTTF' more than 'BOD', so I'll quickly talk about this point.

Needless to say both 'HTTM' and 'BTTF' go back into the past by a generation to effectively 'fix' things in the present, and return to the contemporary moment from whence their journey started. What's interesting in each instance is just how little America has changed between 1985 and 2010 in terms of what it thinks is 'fixed'.

What's particularly unchanged is how success is measured in material terms and then superficial, cosmetic terms after that. So for all the spiritual growth the characters go through in both films, the rewards for their growth are mainly material. This is pretty solidly bourgeois and one shouldn't be surprised that it is the case, but it is pretty stark how even in 2010 the only kind of success that is meaningful for the characters in a movie are material.

It's enough to make you wonder if there are any other ways of expressing this kind of thing in cinematic terms, or whether cinema is so fundamentally bourgeois that it can never escape the materialist position for anything. These are not necessarily faults of the films or film makers, but rather an observation about American cinema as a whole. We all know for instance that Australian cinema is decidedly tragic and anti-climactic out of ideological choice and so naturally flounders at the box office. I guess I am more impressed with how unflinching and unchanging the ideological position is between 1985 and 2010.

The Reconstruction Of Social Meaning

After the tumult of the previous decades, certain things were very matter of fact by 1985. Such as drugs and kids' inordinate interest in experimenting with them as well as dysfunctional families. Everybody growing up knew a whole bunch of kids at school whose parents had either split up or were splitting up. These kinds of things were old hat, so to speak, and thus you can see in 'BOD' an attempt to re-configure the family. The heterogenous interests of Lane's family members - his mother's cooking and his brothers' projects - represent the early attempt to re-imagine a nuclear family in spite of everybody's quirks. It's significant because it comes a good few years before 'the Simpsons' came along and institutionalised the tolerance. Compared to 'the Simpsons', the 'weird family' gags look lame today.

And so the 1986 in 'HTTM' is so exaggerated for comedy, it couches 1980s mores in an ironic manner. While both films remain loose comedies, the gap between the two films tells us quite a bit about how we have moved on. For a start in 'BOD', none of Lane's friends are black. There is a French exchange student, some Asian kids who have adapted to America, there is a freaky fat kid, but nobody is black. In 'HTTM', one of the friends is black. In the mythically recreated 1980s of 'HTTM' the racial divide has been overcome. This is underscored by the gag exchange:

"What colour is Michael Jackson?"

"He's black of course!"

"Aaaaaaaaghhhhh!!!!"

The certitude of Michael Jackson's colour is somehow meant to overshadow the certitude of the racial divide as it existed in 1980s America. It's a nice attempt to rewrite history, but it is what it is - an attempt to rewrite history. This sort of has odd flow on effects...

You Call That Heavy Metal?

I remember in the 1980s, people talking heatedly about music from the 1950s and 1960s and it was such a bore. This is going to be very boring for people born after 1985.

There's an animated sequence built around Van Halen's song 'Everybody Wants Some' in 'BOD'. The Heavy Metal band of choice in 'HTTM' is Poison. If you asked me the relative merits of the 2 bands I'll tell you Van Halen wins hands down. I mean really, if you played guitar it was Jimi Hendrix, then Eddie Van Halen, who truly revolutionised lead guitar playing.

Also if you check out the wikipedia entry on Poison you can see they were still a relatively minor act in 1985-1986. If you asked me, Poison really weren't on anybody's radar in that period unless you were a metal head. This average crowd of youths getting off on Poison just wasn't true in 1986.

The 'lie' so to speak in 'HTTM' is that when the band hits the stage in 1986, it's a multi-racial band with a black singer. In 'BOD', it's a blonde girl in a really short skirt fronting an all-white band. Even the music sounds 'wrong' in 'HTTM'. The 1980s don't sound so nuanced so much as having a sheen. Guitar tones are light, the voices are pitched tightly and high, the beat is almost bionically 'up'. The stage act in 'HTTM' would have gone down as lame in 1985.

Some contemporaneous 80s albums that were on high rotation on my Walkman in 1985-1986:

• '1984' by Van Halen


• 'Drama' & '90125' by Yes


• 'Ghost In The Machine' & 'Synchronicity' by The Police


• 'Beat' & 'Three of A Perfect Pair' by King Crimson


• 'PG4' & 'So' by Peter Gabriel


• 'Service' by Yellow Magic Orchestra


• 'Gone To Earth' by David Sylvian


• 'Invisible Touch' by Genesis

I was a prog geek. Still am, but that's another story.

Anyway, I mention all that in passing because none of the nostalgia invested in the music in 'HTTM' moved me in the least bit whereas listening to the music playing in 'BOD' actually felt like the 1980s I remembered. It's not music I liked, but it was music that was of its time.

The gap between the two positions is interesting in that it highlights the shift in perception as to what exactly was considered commercial then and how much of it can still be sustained. The music of the past is often not how you imagine it to have been contextualised.

The Camaro Was The Car


Oddly enough the two films are connected through Chevrolet Camaros. A 1967 Chevy Camaro is the featured sports car in 'BOD' while 'HTTM' shows the character of Lou attempting suicide in his up to date Chevy Camaro.

You can chalk it up to coincidence or have a think about what a Camaro is. The first Camaro went on sale in 1966. It's a Gen-X car.