The jukebox at Washington DC’s Black Cat is out of order. Or, it’s out of order as a jukebox – it works just fine as a multi-disc CD player, stuck on shuffle. Someone took the protective covering out from under the glass on the front, and you can see right into its guts. It’s pretty beautiful, I think.

I took this photo with TrueHDR via a wide-angle lens stuck to the front of my iPhone 4, then ran it through the Photoshop app and some other stuff to get this image:

I’ve been writing and editing and re-writing my story for this Monday’s Moth GrandSLAM, just scribbling it over and over on a legal pad to make sure I’ve got it. The theme is “Into the Wild,” which poses a challenge. I’ve pretty much told and re-told what I like to think is a pretty solid story on that theme. I’ve told that thing right into the red dirt, to be honest. I’m sure my friends, family, and the odd person I am totally trying to impress is sick to their guts of it. I think I’ve worn a track in my brain from repeating it so damn much.

I got one of the best passive-aggressive guilt trips about this that I’ve ever had from anyone that wasn’t my own mother recently. She’s a great friend I met through the Moth, and when I suggested I wanted to visit that old incarnation of that story for the theme, she said “Yeah, I mean, you could do that. But if you won with it, I think you’d feel pretty cheap.”

She’s right. So I’m working on it, but brother, you never know you’ve got something until it’s over and done with. The challenge here is to find other material in that experience, stuff that didn’t make the first cut and massaging it into something brand-new.

And beyond that, I’ve got this pretty awesome guilt complex going where I think that if I’m not worrying enough about something, I’ll have earned every microsecond of perceived failure if it doesn’t go off perfectly. Healthy, I know.

I was sitting there making myself nuts last night trying to tighten this thing, and I finally just had to pack it in. Instead, I started fooling with my camera and ended up making this little photo, below. It’s half a tribute to Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons and half my own inner monster threatening that same old kangaroo, saying “you better deliver again, buddy.”

I shot this with a Nikon D90 and started fiddling with an HDR tutorial. That kinda went pear-shaped, so I manipulated the thing to look like a still from an old movie that you might have seen late at night when you were supposed to be sleeping.

Psychotronic cinema is pretty much the best kind,if you ask me. It’s the purest expression of beauty in art — something that blossoms when everyone involved with the film was trying to do something else. That’s actual magic right there.

I didn’t try too hard with this photo, just kind of relaxed and had fun with it. Any beauty in there comes from that spontaneity, from just playing with well-loved stuff and seeing what comes out.

I’m sure there’s some kind of parallel from that to my storytelling experience, but damned if I can see it.

Apparently, a robot-armed Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, the yellow Power Ranger, The Thing, and a redheaded Reed Richards and have teamed up…

…to FENCE AGAINST THE EARTH!

And on top of this already delicious ridiculousness, when I took a closer look at their approximation of Superman:

…I immediately made this association:

God, I love this stuff.
PREVIOUSLY IN FOREIGN PLAYTIME ODDITIES: Coming to America Wrapped in Plastic and Cardboard

AND PREVIOUSLY IN AWESOME TOYS : The Longing for Lost Toys

So at the live show, you will see a very talented magician and burlesque host. He will be performing magic. In this video I am posting, he is not. He is telling a story. His name is Nelson Lugo.

As part of Cyndi’s neverending quest to make burlesque performers tell a story and storytellers strip, we had Nelson over at Standard Issues in October.

He did a great job, because he is a charming man. However he did wear that hat. So this is more radio than video, in certain ways.

Oh, and you should drop by billyjoesboy.com. Because I am a brilliant literary mind who could desperately use the traffic bump.

It shows three Masters of the Universe figures that belonged to my brother and I — Jitsu, Tung Lashor (in the Land Shark) and Battle-Damage Skeletor — lined up against the wood panel & linoleum backdrop of the trailer-with-added-rooms that we grew up in, and I f*cking LOVE IT.

I remember the spot where this photo was taken, and I remember that just down the hall under our bunk beds, and under the desk in my father’s “office” there were plastic tubs and wooden boxes of other action figures and vehicles… Transformers, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, Marvel Secret Wars, DC Super Powers, M.A.S.K., M.U.S.C.L.E., Battle Beasts, Centurions, and probably others that I’m forgetting. We also had a giant-sized bin of LEGO blocks, all jumbled in together like an 8-bit plastic gumbo. I can remember the feel of the blocks’ corners and the shooshing, tinkling sound as I rummaged through them looking for just one more clear red dot to cap off the wing of my spaceship.

We still have a few of these things in a closet at my mother’s house. (Or we will until I steal them this summer. Heads up, Mom.) But the bulk of them were given away to our nephews or other kids-of-friends-of-the-family, and from what I hear, many were promptly broken. (*single tear*)

So in pining for my lost clumps of cast plastic and rubber, I decided to fire up the group nostalgia engines. I asked my fellow contributors Jeff, Brad and Cyndi if they had any thoughts along these lines to share, and indeed they did…

CYNDI:
“Where did my Dawn Dolls go? In 1960′s and 1970′s. My friends and I had all the accessories, The Dawn Disco, The Dawn, Beauty Pageant. We would take our Dawn dolls with us for play dates and so my Dawn doll got out and partied. My dawn doll enjoyed the fine art of strip tease – after I saw Gypsy. My accessory? A Dawn Doll purse. It was a plastic purse that had compartments for Dawn (with a sliding window so she could breathe) and room for her clothes. Plus a section in back for your wallet etc. Here is an amazing promo video that was probably used in trade shows that shows it all!:

Where did they go? I’ll never know. I imagine that great doll disco in the sky.”

BRAD:
“I don’t have a lost toy story… but there was a giant box of Peanuts books, those $1:50 (in the late seventies/early eighties) mass market size, pulp books of comic strips.

Every time we would go anywhere, garage sales, grocery store, Wal-Mart, I would beg my Mom to buy me one of these. By the time I was in high school and not reading them anymore, there were about three hundred of these in a cardboard box. By the time I was in my twenties and old enough to be nostalgic for them, that box was gone and nobody knew what happened to it. I still look for it when I go home.”

JEFF:
“I’ve had this Han Solo since 1981/1982. Chewbaccas came and went. I once lost a Chewbacca in the yard and found him a year later, his arms and legs turned green. Now he’s gone.

I was fiddling with this photo while listening to Slint’s ‘Good Morning Captain’, and started imagining Hoth Han here as the ‘captain’ in the song, sending a message via a dying camera to a lost Chewbacca.”

What about you, readers? Drop your nostalgia in the comments.

(click the image for a zoom-able larger version on Munday’s own site.)