I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to the Earth-3 Owlman (pre-Crisis)

I. Space Age Love Song.
Old testament folks never really got VH1 on cable anyhow, I´m thinking to myself as this cute brown-haired girl is going on and on about something that started out as one of those sad-but-amusing stories regarding her family, or someone that she knows, but then slipped away into a whole different thing, by which time of course I have lost all interest altogether in the conversation, and have since begun paying attention to other stuff - - hence my silently nodding but not to her voice but in fact to the opening riffs to the A Flock of Seagulls´ Space Age Love Song that´s started playing in the back of my head like an automatic FM radio to shield my brain against the boredom of the mundane: Ta-na-na na-na na-na na-na-na I was falling in loooove...

I should be thinking of getting this girl to bed but instead I´m thinking of the funny hairdo that the Seagulls´ lead singer used to have back in the day: Up then combed back like a bird´s; he was probably the first New Wave singer to actually outdo New Wave hairstyles, or at the very least he was one of its biggest exponents. Kind of looked like Owlman if you really think of it, that old Justice League of America supervillain from back in the ´60s that hailed from an alternate Earth where good was bad, and thus he was some evil Batman counterpart or something, but wearing what seems to be stuffed fowl over his head, beak and everything.


II. The Book of Job (guest-starring: Eclipso!).
I have since come to believe I´m here on Earth to be tested by god, like Job, who lost everything but held on to his faith and was deeply rewarded afterwards.

No, wait.

Actually I haven´t come to believe such a thing, mostly because I´m an atheist who finds religion a rather silly idea, not entirely unlike the concept of the Earth-3 Owlman, or the guy with the freak hairdo repeating I was falling in loooove... ad nauseum over bad MTV-heyday-era special effects on cable reruns, but it would be pretty cool if we were all being tested for our respective faiths while here on Earth anyhow.
But really: Ever thought of what you´d be tested for? Jesus Christ, you could be tested for a lot of stuff, I mean, you´re like this golden statue of Wonder Woman for chrissakes. Me? My test would very likely fall within that Seinfeld-ian range going from breakfast cereal to comic books. Like, the answer to that exam´s final question would be, Eclipso debuted in Solar City, which according to the Flash v.2 #106 some good thirty year later, was based in California, of course. But then I´d be damned to hell anyway, because so prone to answering fast without thinking, I would have mistaken The Flash #106 for #107, then realize on my way down to hell: Oh man! 105 started the Mirror Master two-parter! I knew that one by heart because that´s when it the numbering matched up with the Barry Allen´s series that came before!

Oh Eclipso, you´re so gonna be the death of me...


III.Armchair psychology.
People who know me say I have this knack for falling in love with all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. A little nudging to the armchair psychology would probably yield that classic defense mechanism that says, when we´re after the unattainable it´s because we´re simply avoiding the other stuff by seeking solace upon a fantasy.

Something like that, hence that latest pet project of mine, falling in love with a girl that´s bound to be married in a couple of months, then going the other way around & playing roulette (russian-style!) with the likes of this cute brunette telling me stories of her family while I decide whether it´s really worth of even trying to get her to bed or not, and ultimately deciding Jesus Christ, what the hell, beats the crap out of ending up all alone at home on some rainy Friday evening.
Yeah well, classic defense mechanism some might say but not the Owlman- - In the back of my head the Owlman´s got his band started with those cool, cool opening riffs to that song of theirs, they´re going ta-na-na na-na na-na na-na-na then nodding to me behind bad MTV-heyday-era special effects as I explain myself to them in their own words: I saw her eyes, she made me smile; for a little while I was falling in loooove...


IV. The bad pun: "This is a Job for Superman!".
Regardless of there actually being a god or not, or whether religion really plays an active role in each of our lives (not in mine though), maybe we are all like Job in a sense, maybe we are all like the Earth-3 Lex Luthor, the purehearted Christ-like bald messiah fighting alone against unsurmountable odds in a land dominated by Owlman & kin.

My point is...
Well, actually this is the bit that´s gotten re-written a lot of times because I´ve indeed found some difficulty in getting to the point.
So the only way of cutting past the dumbassed metaphors and straight to the point, is to put your premises to fight it out:

So picture the ring in your mind: You got your ringside seats alright and this drop-dead gorgeous blonde by your side. You can see myself sitting on the other side. I´m alone and not eyeing the fight per se but the girl a few rows above, she with the fiancé by her side. Fuck. Then the contenders enter the ring, one from each side.
On one side you got Job, undefeated champion of the Old Testament with his iron will and unbreakable faith in god. The crow goes wild, clapping hands and shouting, hurling fedoras up in the air, etc. The only two idiots booing Job are the devil, naturally, who oddly enough also has a drop-dead gorgeous blonde by his side, and me.
On the other side creeps in this guy clad in gray leotards, yellow belt, navy blue trunks, boots and a cape with scalloped ends, and a strikingly peculiar tawny-colored headgear that looks like stuffed fowl. For a second you get to mistake the fight for some one-hit-wonder music video from twenty five years back, but then you realize no, that´s not the guy from A Flock of Seagulls, but in fact that´s Owlman the evil Batman counterpart from Earth-3 (pre-Crisis).

First blood is Job´s, or course, who hurls a stone at the Owlman. Job hurls a stone mostly because I get stuck into writer´s block when it comes to biblical melee attack weaponry, and since most Bible metaphors seem to involve stones... so there.
The Owlman, though, does some funky Batman-dancing with his cape and parries Job´s attack. He then plunges forward like a bat-slash-bird hybrid and draws a quirky-looking sci-fi red pistol from his belt holster. It´s called a Illumina-Gun if the audience is anal-retentive enough to even care. It fires bright bursts of light.
Job instinctly raises his hands to his eyes as he´s temporarily blinded by the flash of light, and thus opens his guard. The Owlman wastes no time and delivers a solid round-house kick to his foe´s solar plexus.
Winded, Job falls to the floor and starts looking around for more stones. Doesn´t find any.
The Owlman is already over him, bending down like a badly-dressed omen, his eyes gleaming like opals.
Job´s first reaction is to panic, I mean, no one´d told him that the Owlman possessed hypnotic powers- - but he does.
So Job falls into a trance, utterly motionless and quiet. Then is dropkicked out of the ring by his avian foe, and loses the fight altogether, much to the dismay of the god-fearing crowd who paid good seats for a one-round-only bar-room brawl.

Now of course Job would nevertheless tell the reporters afterwards that he might have lost the fight but not his faith in god, etc, that kind of stuff.
Dialogue would go like:

JOB: Yes, sure, I guess I did lose to that Owlman fella in the end but hey who hasn´t? My faith in god remains strong as ever, however.
OWLMAN: I shall rule the world!
ME: Yeah, yeah.


V. Is that what they meant by Televangelism?
So yeah, I get to yeah, yeah to myself in the back of my head at this point out of sheer boredom because remember, I´m supposed to be talking to this cute brown-haired girl who´s still is going on and on about something that started out as one of those sad-but-amusing stories regarding her family, or someone that she knows, but then slipped away into a whole different thing, by which time of course I have lost all interest altogether in the conversation, and realized maybe I´d really rather be slouching on the living room couch, zapping with the remote from VH1 to the History Channel, and back again - - And incidentally, just what are the odds of tuning in as they´re showing a A Flock of Seagulls music video??

But hey- - Old testament folks never really got VH1 on cable anyhow, I´m thinking to myself... et al.

Refugees from the 20th century, redux: Two recent concerts

There´s a reason for all the recent increase in New Wave-name dropping in here; saw two shows this month that have blown up my mind!


I.
First one was Cyndi Lauper´s last week. I kid you not.
Sure- - who was ever expecting anything out of a Cyndi Lauper concert in 2008?- - so my expectations pretty much amounted to finding a calm spot by a wall, leaning back, and waiting for True Colors to start, something like that.

That wasn´t exactly what happened, though.

The show started, she crept onstage like a vampire, quietly and somber, looking not at the audience but down ay her own feet, and was dressed in a black puffy dress and all, plus the mandatory crazy hair. The routine lasted for a few seconds, though, because a tremendously heavy bassline kicked in, accompanied by some equally heavy drumming from the band.

What the hell, I thought, then looked around and everyone seemed just as surprised: It was a rock concert more than anything else, and did the lady deliver...!
From catchy techno dancefloor songs from her new album, which I think I´d never heard before, to all the early-1980s stuff I love (yep, she did the Goonies song as well) the band played hard but not nearly as hard as her sustaining those high-pitched chorus lines for what seemed an eternity and no one in the audience was able to follow.
Woman howled like a banshee, and how old is she? Near her 50s or something? Totally unreal...

Best parts were her stopping halfway through the show and asking the audience in the front row what they wanted to hear, and they asked for some really old, obscure songs I couldn´t even remember existed- - She said oh what the heck, talked things over with the band for a minute or so, warned the public they´d never played that one together, then blasted it out loud anyhow.
And her cover to Roy Orbinson´s I Drove All Night. I mean, I´d heard that one before on a CD or something, like a thousand years ago but I never thought she´d play it live, and she did, and almost brought down the roof on us - -at least that was what I felt when everyone started leaping on the air like frogs on methadone.

All in all... Jesus Christ, I don´t think anybody expected the lady to play and sing that hard, but she did for about an hour and a half, and we all left the concert exhilarated.


II.
Now Duran Duran has never been my favorite band but if they´re coming to town, hey, why not? I mean, they were the quintessential 1980s pop group and pretty much created that whole MTV-slash-music video culture of twenty years ago after all.

Also they got some pretty great songs, so there I was yesterday evening.

The backdrop of the stage was this painting of a very gritty skyline in blacks, purples and dark greys, half Gotham City and half downtown São Paulo alright. So that prompted me to turn to **** even before the show started and say, Hey I have a good feeling about this one.
Once powerful searchlights fired from that very backdrop and flooded the audience in white light, I knew I was right and it sure meant we were having a good concert, but...

Well, as I learned last night, there are rockstars and popstars, and then there´s Simon Le Bon, who freaking belongs to his own category and is something else entirely.

The band started out with a good mix of recent songs and the classics, which was already enough to make everybody happy and stuff: Early on Hungry Like the Wolf was played and danced to, so why would I bother to listen to a few tunes from the new Red Carpet Massacre, which I´d never heard before? But as it turned out the new songs were amazingly cool and by the time the first hour had passed by I looked at my own shirt, drenched in sweat and crumpled, and realized I´d been dancing and jumping around and heck, cavorting to boot.
The sound was so loud, all meanings implied, and I thought I was gonna leave the show deaf but good deaf, if there´s ever such a thing, because the electric guitar was hard but clear, the drum and the bass, more than the show above, played like grenades going off, the synthesiser made it feel like 1983 all over again, and Simon Le Bon who despite the beer-belly simply wouldn´t stop moving and running around, and doing his best Batman act with his panache perfectly synchronized to lighting effects that you´d swear they brought down from Mars or something.

Then the second hour began and Duran Duran, plus the throbbing, otherwordly lighting, started to machine gun all us down with one old hit after another, non-stop, from Notorious and Wild Boys to Ordinary World and Save a Prayer, and oh so many more.

That second hour felt like Christmas morning when you´re a kid and the new bike´s coming in, like being fourteen and finally wringing out that first kiss from that impossibly gorgeous ginger-haired girl you´d been fancying since like the 6th grade, I don´t know- - A few months back I´d gone to that Echo & the Bunnymen concert, and they are one of my fave bands, so when I left the show I had enormous blisters on the soles of my feet- - but this Duran Duran concert was something into itself: The band played beyond favorite bands, beyond whichever kind of music you might like: If I compared Ian MacCuloch to a drunken messiah onstage, Simon Le Bon was like god himself in a shirt and a tie, making love to that microphone, dancing around very devil-may-care, the entire band clearly enjoying the whole thing...

Bottom line is, I´d been dancing and leaping and shouting around for two hours and that one was beyond having blisters in the soles of my feet: The music was like a drug pumping from inside my chest out into the crowd, and everyone was dancing and singing along, clapping their hands...

Best show I´ve ever been to, bar none!



- - And then, even after you thought you´d seen everything and all great songs had been played, the encore being at its ending and more than two hours had gone by... then band started with that funky metallic raindrop-like sound we´re all so familiar with from the VH1 ads, the audience almost exploded in a manic burst of clapping, then began shouting Rio in unison and- -

Simon Le Bon, who´s either the last of the kings of the pop, or the first, or both, was once quoted as saying Duran Duran being the band to listen to when the bombs start dropping, but seeing them live like, twenty-five years later and they start playing Rio like you´d never thought you´d listen to, and they´re playing it just as cool and smooth but so much heavier, so much harder, and you´re there in the audience and it feels like the sea during a storm, and you´re singing along then that first chorus hits- - It feels like when the band, the audience, the entire show, the whole world shine they´re showing what they can, and well.... Her name is Rio and she doesn´t need to understand....

The Japanese call it “Divine wind”, I call it the New Adventures!

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Oh well. Here we go again!

Montgomery Peer vs. the Wicked Witch of the West

PART I: The fairytale with a metaphor.
Regardless of her being knighted under satan´s service, and that providing girls will even get knighted in the first place, the Wicked Witch of the West soon took advantage of Peer going through one of those summer doldrums sort-of moments, in which he got around to tinkering with his armor, tessellating the living ceramic-like material into fine, fine chainmail made rigid by spell-casting.
When prompted by the rest of the king´s men where he´d ever got the tech, Montgomery Peer ever the lonely black knight shrugged, smiled and told them “Wikipedia, of course,” but of course that was only half the truth.

So the Witch, being naturally wicked, oozed all her wickedness through the lepton-sized links of Peer´s new armor, past his forcefield and straight into his cerebral cortex. Peer had only recently disclosed his secret identity to the world, see- not that it had been such a secret in the first place- but it made all the difference to the Witch: All of a sudden hitting closer to home never sounded so easy and she never let the hand on her watch leap another second.
If Peer´d ever got around to asking her why, she´d have told him he meddled in a game of gods, and whom gods destroy... you know, all that jazz that drama queens such as Peer were so fond of.

Peer´s two-month fall and his hurting his neck while re-arranging the furniture in his bedroom at 5:30 in the morning fit into a different story altogether. Suffice to say there were dragons but only because here there be et al. I mean, really, nothing you haven´t seen in here before.
Just like with the ingrown toenail or when he practically liquefied the cartilage on his patellae or all those bruised, bleeding knuckles after bloodstained doors and walls and shattered mirrors down through the years. Point is, How many Charles Bronson movies you gotta see before you catch the meaning? This blog´s got a little fairytale on it, I´ll grant you that much, but so little of the Kabbalah, so come on.

Do bear it with me; I mean of course Montgomery Peer found his way around the Witch´s spell; that´s not even the point of this story. Naysayers may even tell you the whole point in having the good guys winning out in the end is like an outlet for Sadism, but... I don´t know. I really don´t and if you want me to be perfectly honest with you on this, it´s just digressing from our part. It really is.
So hey, so there, so back to our story.


PART II: After the fall.
A couple of months later- and this bit really, really happened as described, hence the first-person narration- I was climbing up the stairs to the office (taking the elevator up to the 4th floor feels like overkill) and it was on one of those days it just feels there´s a twenty-ton elephant sitting on your chest because it´s so hard to breathe, akin to having your heart broken times a hundred.
I stopped then leaned my back against the wall and stayed there not moving until the lighting went out and the entire stairway got dark. I took a deep breath despite the aforementioned twenty-tonner, then exhaled. Thought of nothing then thought of everything I should get down to words and up on the blog.

Wanna hear something sad, but pretty funny?
I mean, I did write down everything I wanted upon reaching my desk on the fourth floor, but after re-reading my very heart poured in ink on paper, well, it just made me feel like I started this whole blog a few years ago sounding just like Holly f*cking Golightly wavering between her blues and her reds, and now it just seems like the ending to any episode from the Bear in the Big Blue House, I kid you not.

I bet you got the Capote reference right off the bat but I wonder of your proficiency in matters more Disney Channel-wise. –Ey. Whatever. Anyway, it goes like this: Every time the show ends this bear, which is a Jim Henson bear, goes up to the attic in his big blue house which really isn´t that big if you think about it, and pretty much sums up the entire plot of said episode to his good friend the moon, deftly named Luna. You know, kind of like Smallville with Clark at the barn but sans all the sissy bits involving Lana Lang that tramp.

(Just for the record: I always told you you were my Lyla Lerrol, never a Lois or a Lana).

But really.
Rock bottom happened once I realized my life´d suddenly ended up just like the kiddie TV show I (secretly) watch during breakfast. And there was nothing I could do about it.


PART III: Redemption comes with requesting software access.
So we´d been anxiously waiting for this password for some online application or another at the office in order to get those Methods & Procedures going. It was allegedly automatically generated by the server and fired straight to each of our inboxes upon the completion of an electronic form within the Lotus Notes database that would make Dante´s descent into hell seem like a walk in the park.
But anyhow.
In came the e-mails with our passwords, mine just synched with the Bear in the Big Blue House epiphany and well, you´ve seen those passwords generated by a web server. Mine mixed words and numbers.
It said in Courier 10 font:

ABJURE37

I mean. Abjure thirty-seven. Swear to god.
Right at that moment when I was down and out and finished with and ready to give in... and then... out of the blue...

I gasped, obviously, then said “NO, THANK YOU!” out aloud and started giggling for a full ten seconds up until when the girl sitting next to me asked whether my password, like hers, sounded weird and didn´t make any sense.
“Not really,” I told her with the corner of my mouth curling up into a cocky half-smile. “Actually it makes a lot of sense.”

A couple of hours later I was at my usual bathroom stall at the mall, changing my clothes and slipping on my running sneakers: To hell with having hurt my neck and to hell with having my heart broken. To hell with wherever sad people have their breakfast, at Tiffany´s or at the bear´s blue house, and also to hell with choosing not to become a superhero.
I might not know where I´m going, but I sure know how to dent the memetics of the mundane while at it...



MORAL OF THE STORY: End of the day, you freakin´ moronic Wicked Witch of Wherever, you can assemble as many winged monkeys as you see fit and even strap them into the cockpits of F-22s, but you´ll never beat Jungian synchronicity coupled with a guy with a promise etched to his flesh!