"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Spandau Ballet, "Gold"

Song: "Gold" by Spandau Ballet
Released: 1983
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the 2000 Black Books episode "He's Leaving Home." The "He" is Manny (Bill Bailey), the bumbling assistant of misanthropic second-hand bookshop owner and boozehound Bernard Black (Dylan Moran). Tired of his verbally abusive boss/flatmate, Manny moves out and ends up breaking the lump of coal that stands in place of Bernard's heart.
Which moment in "He's Leaving Home" does it appear?: Spandau Ballet's '80s empowerment anthem accompanies the montage of Manny's rise as the star model of a sleazy photographer (Omid Djalili) with a fetish for beard hair like Manny's. (The Djalili character would go apeshit like an "Oprah's Favorite Things" audience member if he visited present-day Williamsburg.) The "Gold" montage is one of the funniest sequences in the surreal Britcom's oddly arranged three-season history. During her DVD commentary with Moran and Bailey, co-star Tamsin Greig (who's currently testing the patience of reviewers as the uptight wife/writing partner on Showtime's Episodes) does nothing but laugh all through the montage when the commentary reaches that point of the episode. The sequence is one of several moments in which Black Books turns Bailey's balding and long hair into an amusing visual gag, whether it's trimming his hair to show how ridiculous Manny would look as a prim chain bookstore employee or coiffing it to hilarious effect like in the montage, which can be seen here.

I always thought "Gold" would have been a great opening title theme for a Roger Moore-era 007 flick. Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp probably thought so too. In fact, he originally wrote "Gold" as a spoof of 007 themes. (That early incarnation of the song lives on in the Goldfinger-style imagery in the "Gold" video, which is nicely covered here by Images of Heaven, a blog about '80s MTV videos. I didn't know the gold-painted chick in the video is a young, pre-Bram Stoker's Dracula Sadie Frost.)

Tomorrow's "Rock Box" Track of the Day is a much more timely and desperate-sounding song that's also about trying to keep ya head up.

The Palace: So This Is Where the Asians Hang Out? begins June 14 and concludes June 20 at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com

I hate inking my own webcomic. It takes forever to do. Instead of adding ink directly onto each original sketch that I did in blue pencil, I place a tracing pad sheet over the sketch and redraw it in ink. (Even though the time-consuming process drives me crazy, I prefer to do it this way because when I scan the tracing pad sheet, the redrawn strip looks more dirt-free and clean than the version that's in pencil, so I don't have to do too much digital editing.) If one of my knuckles brushes up against a newly inked line or letter, it can smudge, so I have to wait a few minutes for the ink to dry before I resume inking. I bet this is what shooting a makeout scene with a temperamental actress who hates being touched by you must be like: a lot of stopping and starting and having to make sure your knuckle doesn't brush up against her boob because if it does, she'll throw a fit and refuse to come out of her trailer, and everything's ruined.

While scripting most of The Palace's STIWTAHO? arc a couple of months ago, I Netflixed DVDs of the surreal early '00s Britcom Black Books. A former colleague once blogged about his enjoyment of the show, and he mentioned that one of its running gags was the lead character's hatred of cell phones--something I really identify with--so I always wanted to check out Black Books, but I kept putting it off. I finally got around to Netflixing the show and enjoyed the hell out of it.

I was surprised to find that Black Books covered some of the same ground I've covered in my webcomic. The Dark Knight watercooler talk ban that Connor--an Irishman like Bernard Black--enforced at his business in The Palace's In the Shadow of the Bat arc is like any one of Bernard's various rules at his bookshop ("No mobiles, no walkmans, none of that or any of the others...").

When I came up with the concept for The Palace, I set it at an independently run art house/repertory theater that's barely scraping by instead of a successful multiplex that shows current blockbusters because struggling or failing always makes for more interesting material than being at the top (a reason why I got bored with Entourage). Black Books star/co-creator Dylan Moran must have been aware of that too. He said he set his show in an indie bookshop because he was fascinated by the theme of doomed enterprise. "Running a second-hand bookshop is a guaranteed commercial failure. It's a whole philosophy," said Moran in a 2000 Guardian article. "There were bookshops that I frequented and I was always struck by the loneliness and doggedness of these men who piloted this death ship."

Is it me, or is Bernard a dead ringer for Spike Spiegel?