For those looking for your first fix until regular blogging resumes, here’s a quiz courtesy of Konstantin:

Ghost Rider? I’ll confess to not having much familiarity with this character, aside from the Nicholas Cage movie and glimpses of the classic comic-book covers in my Cool Older Cousin’s room when I was a kid. (The COC had lots of stuff that I found both enticing and a little bit scary, which of course is why I thought he was so cool in the first place. My dim memories of his interests are like a catalog of early to mid-70s teenage macho: Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange comics, Bruce Lee posters, kung fu throwing stars and dumb-bells, heavy metal album covers, beaded curtains and blacklights… it was all so arcane and eerie and wonderful.)

Anyway, I’ve always thought that Ghost Rider was at least visually awesome, so I can live with this. What’re your results?

Seeing all those glorious mullets and baggy t-shirts and big-block plaids earlier sent me wandering around the InterWebs in search of more of the nostalgic same, which eventually led me to 80s-Music.net and the following compilation of music-video clips that span the entire decade. It’s pretty fun:

Is it just me or did music go to hell the year after I graduated from high school (1987)?

I’ve noted before that I’m not a big fan of Christmas music, and the stuff from that I do like tends to be of the more melancholy, wistful variety. The upbeat songs usually make me squirm, because their cheerfulness so often strikes me as synthetic and forced, if not downright hysterical — “Carol of the Bells” is a particular offender in the “hysteria” category; it always sounds to me like the performers are going to ram their bells down our throats if we don’t acknowledge their mantra of “merrymerrymerrymerrychristmas!” — and also because I simply don’t want to give into their shiny insistence that everything is holly-jolly-wonderful. So I was a little bit surprised at just how happy this old music video made me feel when I ran across it earlier, especially considering that I’ve been teetering at the edge of my annual funk for a couple of days:

Yes, I know this song — “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid, in case you don’t remember — and its American counterpart, “We Are the World,” are sappy and condescending toward the very people they were recorded to help, and we all got really damn tired of hearing them every five minutes (especially “We Are the World,” which at its peak was well-nigh inescapable). But I got a kick out of seeing the old clothing styles and trying to identify all the participants, and… well, hell, I’m not going to apologize for the fact that this little piece of ’80s claptrap made me feel better on a gloomy morning. Maybe it’ll do the same for someone out there…

Via Sullivan, who made me smile with his quip that, “George Michael’s hair always makes my yuletide gayer.”
For the record, I still miss my mullet.

A few excerpts from a particularly astute piece at the ever-amusing McSweeny’s called “Fifty Years of Popular Songs Condensed into Single Sentences”:

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I’m having one of those downer days when I’m feeling nostalgic, wistful, a bit melancholy… yes, I mean moreso than usual, you bunch of smart alecks! One of these days, I oughta…

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking the last couple of days about relatively obscure songs that I used to like and haven’t heard in many years, trying to remember their titles and track them down in some form or another. Here’s one of those songs, Dennis DeYoung’s “Desert Moon,” which seems to perfectly match my mood today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this video before now. It’s pretty cheeseball, what with the bad acting, occasional patches of banal dialog, and DeYoung’s purple big-block-plaid shirt (actually, I always liked those large-patterned plaids back in the day, but even I have to admit that it looks pretty dated in 2008). Still… I like the song, and on days like this when you can feel the summer heat gradually draining out of the world and autumn lurking just over there in the shadows, I like to listen to this sappy old stuff. Maybe you will, too…

You know, every time I’m close to despair over the fact that all the pop culture I loved in my youth is now being remade, re-imagined, mashed-up, or just plain forgotten, and that nothing really ever seems to stand the test of time, least of all the crap I like, I’ll hear an anecdote that restores my faith, however briefly, that all is not lost…

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And tonight’s entertainment is:

You know, at this rate, I’ll have managed to see all those ’80s bands I missed back in high school by the end of this decade…

If Rick Springfield isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d prefer some classical?