Psychic Departure Bunny Lounge

The Lizard Mixture

Help me, I feel the need to buy Duran Duran tickets. I've never seen them and the lineup is original!

Nothing takes me back to those akward days like Duran Duran.

like some new romantic looking for the tv sound, you'll see i'm right some other time

Shake up the picture the lizard mixture with your dance on the eventide you got me coming up with answers all of which I deny

Or Culture Club

War war is stupid and people are stupid and love means nothing in some strange quarters

Or Kajagoogoo

Oh what a waste harvest the human race

Or Haysi Fantayzee

He stands so high it's enough to make any red skin cry. He knows what's right and he knows that god is with him 'cos he is right - Big Leggy lives. J-J-J-J-John Wayne.

I don't think these songs are on the International Lyrics Playground (sorry Linky), but I did find them (when I couldn't remember every word) at Sun Lyrics.

I could go on, quoting the not-so-spectacular lyrics, couldn't I? But it's not the silly lyrics. It's the whole package, music, lyrics, emotions. They say that the memory of scent is powerful and it is. Nothing quite like it. However, the memory of music does something similar for me. It can brand certain moments, certain memories into the great subconscious only to bring those moments back to the surface at random, just from hearing a song. How else would I remember exactly what it felt like to sit -- in a uniform skirt -- on the cold, hard, smooth concrete of the high school's second floor next to the orange lockers? The kind of concrete that had the special smoothness that made it the concrete of choice for skating - if skates were allowed in school, that is.

That's where we hung out, our own island of misfit toys. We staked out that area. I don't think I consciously realized this then, but high school was all about staking out your area. You didn't really want to be without a territory, floating around the empty areas of the school. The brainy Asian American (and in this case, I really just mean brainy, 'cause most of us were Asian/Pacific Islander) kids got the picnic table near the parking lot. The jocks and cheerleaders kept to the parking lot, playing basketball there because the parking lot also doubled as our physical education space - when we weren't running on city streets (the street was our track). The metalheads and slacker local boyzzz stuck to the third floor, although we had an unspoken agreement that the metalheads were welcome to hang with us at any time.

Mostly, though, it was just us, those first few years. Gina: quick witted, brash, a controlled kind of wildness to her; Julie, intense and determined; Celeste: gentle dreamer; Brenda: kind and quiet; Jacqueline: neurotic and obsessed but still one of us. There were others: Ann, Reiko, Myla, Marilyn, Coleen, Colin, Jerome, Grant, Scott, Duane. We were the group of people without a group and we were the journalism/drama group. Some tried us on for size and stayed and some tried us on and left. There were no fixed boudaries.

The core really revolved around Gina, Julie and me, though. Even when Julie and Gina decided that they were going to be best friends (instead of Gina and me or Julie and me), we were still the core (of our own small worlds, that is). It hurt at the time, since Gina and I were best friends up to that point, but I think I let them be best friends with a secret sigh of relief. I didn't have to keep up the "local" pretenses and could really concentrate on what I liked. I think back on it all and I can't see that we had too much in common - ever. Even then, I knew - my parents realized it long before I did - that I just didn't have it in me to be "local." I appreciate Hawaii, I love going back home for a long visit, but I just don't want to live there.

So things changed as they tend to. By midyear freshman year, I stopped listening to mostly metal and started listening to David Bowie, Duran Duran and Japan. I started spending all my lunch money at Froggies and then Hungry Ear, buying up used lps like they were going out of style, listening to the recommendations of Jon McCain and Peter Bond and Kenji. By the end of freshman year, I was one of the only 4 Duranies/New Romantics in my entire school. Celeste, Brenda and Myla were my cohorts. By sophomore year, though, Myla had gone back to the Philippines and Brenda had migrated to the brainy group. Ann (migrated to us from the brainy group) and Reiko joined us via the drama angle. I was listening to all that cheesy europop - Howard Jones, Kaja, Alphaville, Tears for Fears - in fact, I never did stop listening to that stuff. By junior year, I'd added Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Sex Pistols, the Smiths, Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy into my listening pool. Saw U2 (Oingo Boingo opened) @ the Blaisedell. Wrote to over 100 pen pals in 7 countries but only met two of them (one ended up at my college and I still keep in touch with the other - in fact, we went to the Three O'Clock/REM show on August 31, 1985 @ Radio City Music Hall and then took the train to Hoboken where we caught a ride with the Kilkenny Cats to Maxwell's. The KC were the band that night.). Julie and I became the official photographers for the school newspaper (as well as Editorial page editor) and also for the yearbook. I met Salena at Hungry Ear.

Aside: you would think that working on the yearbook, I'd remember the names of my classmates? Nope. I hear these names in the alumnae news and say "who?" I've pretty much named all the people I remember above (ok, I remember maybe 8 more names).

Senior year. Jelly's opened and I shopped there any time I could. I was a big fan of Hat Makes the Man and Poi Dog Pondering (this was the one-man, Frank Quimby Orrall PDP, long before he moved to Austin and then Chicago) and often asked Frank for recommendations. I began listening to the Velvet Underground. Saw REM, one of the few cool bands that made it to Hawaii, on October 31, 1984 @ the Pier 10 Ballroom, Aloha Tower. Hat Makes The Man opened. REM was in "costume," which means they put on hideous face makeup and wore regular clothes. I have pictures, but don't know quite where they are right now. The set was: Femme Fatale / Harborcoat / Second Guessing / Pretty Persuasion / So. Central Rain / Talk About The Passion / Moon River / Radio Free Europe. No, I don't know this info offhand, I copied it from here.

I believe I went to REM with Salena, Gina, and Celeste. Was Julie there? I don't remember. However, I did a web search recently and found that Julie is still taking photographs and lives in San Francisco. I also found that Celeste (I assume this is her) works in a field related to mine. Of Gina, Google says nothing.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to Scraping Foetus off the Wheel - Nail - right now. That's bringing back a whole different kind of memory...

( 11:42 FH | wriggly. )
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