Recently, in a fit of dubious nostalgia, I purchased the entire eight-DVD set of the first season of the mid-Seventies TV show Space: 1999. I have always thought this show was incredibly cool, by which I mean that I thought it was incredibly cool when it originally aired, and I was nine years old, and because up until now I have not seen any of it again, I've had no opportunity to revisit or revise my childhood reaction. So far I have watched the first two discs, which carry the first six of twenty-four episodes. It would be imprecise to say that I am enjoying them, but I'm glad I have the chance to watch them, and I am going to get through the whole set. As serious speculative fiction, the series is startlingly terrible. My nine-year-old self had, unsurprisingly, a very low standard of intellectual excellence. The spaceships were cool (I believe I had a snap-together Eagle model), the guns were cool (and easy to build out of Legos), the special effects were cool, the title font was cool, etc. My adult self is surprised to discover not just that the quality of speculation in the writing is low, but that the stories, or at least five of the first six of them, feel more like dull drug trips than science fiction at all. Given a perfectly fascinating human premise, a three-hundred-person moonbase forced unexpectedly to function as an interstellar colony ship, the thirty-four-year-old me is dumbfounded that the writers would feel obliged to layer on other challenges, particularly idiotic ones like unexplained time warps and "aliens" whose primary alien-ness is talking as if they are very depressed and have head colds. And poor stories would be bad enough, but they are transformed from poor to downright offensive by the fact that the moronic plots force the highly rational characters (who develop through sheer persistence, if nothing else) to behave in ways that make no internal sense. I am frequently outraged on their behalf, and find myself cheering for tiny little moments in which make-believe scientists get to react, however briefly, like real scientists might.

Sloan are cool. Here is how you can tell they're cool: they're from Halifax, where nobody is ever cool; they dress extremely badly; most people don't know about them; they borrow styles from uncool referents; they don't stand for anything in particular. The Knack, conversely, are not cool. Here is how you know: they're from LA, which is the world headquarters of media cool; they were once arguably the definitive icons of a major fashion movement; they once sold a lot of records and their biggest hit gets reused and re-embraced every five years or so; they swiped most of their style from the most famous and enduringly popular group in the history of the world and they've kept making increasingly competent and assured music like that in obdurate defiance to intervening market trends.

And although I've stopped mail-ordering from Parasol, in part it's because I've found I can just as easily buy most of the same records at the store. And in larger part it's because Parasol the label hasn't been putting out much. In the last twelve months they've released only two proper albums, and subsidiaries Spur and Mud haven't done even one. Hidden Agenda has been busy, but the only two bands they have that I like are Vitesse and Fonda. Of my two favorite Parasol bands, Starlet hasn't been heard from in a while, but one of the records Parasol did put out last year was Be, the second album by Chicago trio Autoliner, who were called Life on Mars back when their then-self-titled debut first came out. The classic Parasol aesthetic is extremely focused, and when they were putting out a dozen albums of it a year I found I could do quite easily without nine or ten of them. And whether the drop in production is intentional, or just a side effect of being distracted by Soundtrack of Our Lives reissues, I don't think it does the overall cause any harm. The Parasol style was perfectible, and I think Autoliner have more or less perfected it: it involves (according to my current alchemical disassembly) about four parts The Byrds, four parts Translator, and one part each of the Posies, the Left Banke, Jellyfish and Hunters & Collectors. Bassist John Ross, guitarist Brian Leach and drummer Tom Curless are all credited with both lead and backing vocals, and on many of these harmony-dense songs they do mean at once. The lyrics are rarely worth reading (what sounds like "Are you ready for the weekend?" turns out to be "Are you ready for the weakened?", which is kind of interesting, but "Supersonic Baby (In Disguise)" pretty well cancels it out), and although having three different lead singers seems like it would help distinguish the songs from each other, in practice I find that the three-part harmonies tend to blur them together more. But since for me this record is encapsulating a style, ten songs blurring together is actually apt. There aren't ten aesthetics at issue here, there is just one, and thirty-six minutes is exactly how long the dream should last.

Add a little glam to your power-pop, though, and suddenly a lot of people who thought it was beneath them start to get interested. I've customarily been somewhere between leery and hostile towards slumming indie snobs playing rock-god, but although Jejune, of whom Lovelight Shine is essentially the party-rock alter-ego, are usually called an emo band, they remind me much more closely of the old Swimming Pool Q's / Guadalcanal Diary / Let's Active axis, and their attempt at teen-icon strut manages to avoid the glib soullessness I thought ruined the Jellyfish / Imperial Drag experiment. Makes Out is only a five-song EP, which is probably about as much as the conceit is worth, but I'm happy as long as it lasts. "Freedom Fighter" is jumpy and brash, goaded along by twitchy tambourine rustle and lots of dive-bombing pick-along-string guitar noises. "X-Ray Vision" is churning and anxious, with heavy overtones of "Bang a Gong" and the Stones. The epic, swirling "Earth's Last Lifeline" is more ambitious, pushing towards Jellyfish, ELO and Boston. "Foxxmeat", despite a title that sounds like sci-fi porno, mixes an Autoliner-ish vocal part with bruising guitar noise and battering drums, and reminds me a little of what EMF tried to do on Stigma (i.e., after the sampler riots of Schubert Dip and before skidding off into the amelodic garbage of Cha Cha Cha). And the breathtaking "The March Is On", to me clearly the song that makes the rest of the project necessary, sounds like a succinct Queen-via-Guns-N'-Roses rock-opera recast in an idiom distilled out of Blue Öyster Cult's Agents of Fortune, Spectres and Fire of Unknown Origin, and not entirely unlike what Sunny Day Real Estate arrived at when they started to go prog on The Rising Tide. Of course, it irked me when people who would never admit to owning Rush albums swooned over SDRE sounding like Rush, and it bothers me when I think that Sloan and Jejune are being "allowed" to make superficial music solely because they have underdog reputations to trade on, while the Knack, who have dedicated their whole career to making the best superficial music possible, are stuck wheedling with Audities geeks that their new record is worth as much as a Rooks reissue. That line of reasoning is mostly inane. There are probably a hundred bands I like more than the Knack who never had anything remotely resembling "My Sharona"'s chart success. Space: 1999 limped through forty-eight episodes; my four favorite television shows only made it to six (Police Squad), twelve (Fawlty Towers), nineteen (My So-Called Life) and forty-five (Monty Python). But in a way that's exactly the point: it's wearying always feeling like my loves are obscure and embattled. It's a great relief to me every time some stray thing I care about finds a little critical (Tori, Low, 69 Love Songs) or popular (Alanis, Jewel) support. I am an elitist by elimination, not by policy. The more company I can get in my elitism, the better. I want to believe that if "My Sharona" can resurface every few years, and people still buy new compilations of old Beatles songs, that the Knack could be huge again. I want to believe that you will help me hold Sloan to a higher standard, and that between us we can convince them to hold themselves to it, too. I want to believe that somebody might eventually do a science-fiction TV show that doesn't insult its own characters. I want us to be able to look back on how we looked forward and say that we were wrong about absolutely every detail of the future, but right to believe that it will be amazing. Right to insist.