Video Christmas Card

I sent 20 Christmas cards today, mostly overseas, so now I am in a Christmassy mood, even though of course it is still Advent and vaguely penitential and blah, blah, Catholic content, blah. I'm just finishing off the bottle of likier czekoladowy; nobody talk to me about penance until it's done.

I have also been in a rather 1980s mood, too, in part because of thinking about all those great 1980s fashions I spent all my allowance on back in the 1980s. There was a big 1960s revival going on much of the time, so a lot of my allowance went towards minis and sleeveless turtlenecks. I had a black-and-green sleeveless turtleneck with a zipper. It was the bomb, baby. Speaking of which, back then we thought the Eastern Bloc might actually drop THE Bomb on us, and also that it was at all credible that Elton John might actually fall in desperate, forbidden love with a sultry Russian border guard named Nikita. Really, it was a time of simultaneous innocence and pointless dread.

One of the songs that almost always got played in the 80s at Catholic high school dances, which were for me the most anticipated events in what the Soviet half of the arms race might have made a short life, was "The Power of Love" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. If you didn't get asked to dance to "The Power of Love", the song represented the gloomiest four minute stretches of your life to date. Never mind "the hooded claw" the singer promised to protect us from. What about the next four minutes of acute wallflowerdom? Bloody hellck.

So you can imagine my shock and joy many, many years later when I finally saw the video to "The Power of Love" and discovered that it was not about romantic, boy-girl, are-you-going-to-the-dance-on-Friday love at all:



Update: Okay, here's the doleful pre-nuclear apocalyptic anthem of my generation. The creepy thing is that although 1989 meant that nobody would drop the Bomb on us after all, it also meant that NATO would in ten years bomb my principal 1987 crush object's hometown to smithereens. When that final horror was going on I was working in a government office, the resident unofficial expert on the changing borders of former Yugoslavia: "I'm sorry, sir, but Canada does not recognize the Republic of Serbian Krajina." Ugh. (Shudder.) Let's see if there's any more Christmassy likier czekoladowy in the bottle.