Spookey Ruben
After the other day’s post on Ariel Pink I discovered (to absolutely no surprise) that he’s buddies with Spookey Ruben. Spookey seemed to be pushed as Canada’s version of Beck (sorry Spookey), crossing musical genres and making homemade recordings as well as videos. I discovered him when I was working at a Spanish-language television station.
It should have been the coolest job ever and probably would have been if I hadn’t been working for Lucifer himself. I spent a lot of time editing local ads into commercial reels and was training to do live switching in the master control which was, I kid you not, a trailer in dude’s backyard. The most important lesson I learned during my tenure there was: if more than one person quits the job within your first week and everyone else tells you that they are going to quit as soon as possible, you should probably get the fuck out yourself.
Anyway, at some point I found a box of anime videos and took to liberating them from the clutches of evil. They had not value to the station because, despite rumors of less-than-ethical practices, they couldn’t legally be broadcast. Plus, they were dubbed in English which is of no good to a Spanish-language television station. And, most importantly, I scored some great movies; Hayao Miyazaki’s super-fun debut Castle of Cagliostro, bizarro live-action/animation mix Twilight of the Cockroaches , and a pretty mind-bending anthology of shorts called Robot Carnival.
At the end of most of the tapes were some sort of ephemera and one of them went almost immediately into this video. Being (presumably) incredibly high at the time (I was watching anime for chrissake), I thought it was the coolest song I’d ever heard. I ended up having to order the album because no one stocked it and, at the time, was sort of disappointed by it. I’m looking at the CD right now and feel like I should give it another go because I’ll probably appreciate it more now.
Regardless, I still really like this song and the video.
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