... and happy birthday, Archer!
31 August 2012
I eat 'em raw like sushi
Happy 21st birthday, last kids to be sure they weren't conceived to "Rico Suave."
... and happy birthday, Archer!
... and happy birthday, Archer!
30 August 2012
A voice like a crystal bell
Happy 21st birthday, first children conceived in the Nancy Lamott era!
Anyone who's listened to WNYC's Jonathan Schwartz Show already knows about her. If you don't, do yourself a favor and learn about one of the greatest talents of this era, whose time on this earth was ended far too soon.
Anyone who's listened to WNYC's Jonathan Schwartz Show already knows about her. If you don't, do yourself a favor and learn about one of the greatest talents of this era, whose time on this earth was ended far too soon.
29 August 2012
26 August 2012
Mookie Blalock
"You must be older than Pearl Jam's Ten to drink in this establishment."
That's the whole album there. I had gone back and forth between "Once," "Jeremy," "Black," and "Garden" as the representative track, but---and this is clued right at once, with the fade-in in the beginning---it really is an album that's meant to be listened to in its entirety, that works as a whole really much more than do all its individual songs. There's a few other examples of albums that work symphonically in this way---U2's Boy certainly, and The Joshua Tree, at least once you skip the first three tracks; The Cure's Disintegration is a better example even than Ten; and Sgt. Pepper's and Good Vibrations and the others even casual music fans can name.
(Funny how, in the age of the iPod shuffle feature, one has to remind the reader that music can be listened to that way.)
This blog's intended audience remembers all of these events and groans when reminded that they're twenty-one years old, so I needn't highlight the significance of this album---and its counterpart, about a month away, now---but for anyone actually close to the age of Pearl Jam's first appearance, it might be necessary to highlight just how bad pop and rock music was. Before this, certainly, but also after. Pearl Jam arrived and blew apart a radio landscape that had been completely devoted to just utter schlock, Milli Vanilli and the New Kids and Roxette, not that there's anything wrong with Roxette but if that's the highlight of the year in music? things must have been terrifically shitty the other 51 weeks, and indeed they were. The arrival of rap as a popular format was incipient, but it certainly hadn't yet changed what was on the dial, other than "Ice Ice Baby." Mariah Carey, sure, she was just starting, and you can't discount her success, but it's not at all the music I listen to, nor what I'm talking about.
And then for one brief shining moment---was it over in a summer? in a season? did it last a year?---two dozen kids from Seattle in five, six different bands just rewrote the entire game. Excellent, excellent music had arrived, and the studio-assembled vanity projects just couldn't maintain their grip on the airwaves, and rock and roll radio actually had rock and roll on it again.
Again, this wouldn't last. By the end of the nineties, "modern rock" had replaced grunge and alternative, and the studios were once again in control. Third Eye Blind was doing its Eddie Vedder impersonation---and it was a good one, or at least it would have fooled Helen Keller---and the folks making money were the ones who always had. (The mp3 was right on the horizon, then, and that really would overturn the order of the biz permanently, the way alternative music had tried to.)
But man. For that summer, or season, or year... Hey, you know what, I'll add "Jeremy" to this, too.
That's the whole album there. I had gone back and forth between "Once," "Jeremy," "Black," and "Garden" as the representative track, but---and this is clued right at once, with the fade-in in the beginning---it really is an album that's meant to be listened to in its entirety, that works as a whole really much more than do all its individual songs. There's a few other examples of albums that work symphonically in this way---U2's Boy certainly, and The Joshua Tree, at least once you skip the first three tracks; The Cure's Disintegration is a better example even than Ten; and Sgt. Pepper's and Good Vibrations and the others even casual music fans can name.
(Funny how, in the age of the iPod shuffle feature, one has to remind the reader that music can be listened to that way.)
This blog's intended audience remembers all of these events and groans when reminded that they're twenty-one years old, so I needn't highlight the significance of this album---and its counterpart, about a month away, now---but for anyone actually close to the age of Pearl Jam's first appearance, it might be necessary to highlight just how bad pop and rock music was. Before this, certainly, but also after. Pearl Jam arrived and blew apart a radio landscape that had been completely devoted to just utter schlock, Milli Vanilli and the New Kids and Roxette, not that there's anything wrong with Roxette but if that's the highlight of the year in music? things must have been terrifically shitty the other 51 weeks, and indeed they were. The arrival of rap as a popular format was incipient, but it certainly hadn't yet changed what was on the dial, other than "Ice Ice Baby." Mariah Carey, sure, she was just starting, and you can't discount her success, but it's not at all the music I listen to, nor what I'm talking about.
And then for one brief shining moment---was it over in a summer? in a season? did it last a year?---two dozen kids from Seattle in five, six different bands just rewrote the entire game. Excellent, excellent music had arrived, and the studio-assembled vanity projects just couldn't maintain their grip on the airwaves, and rock and roll radio actually had rock and roll on it again.
Again, this wouldn't last. By the end of the nineties, "modern rock" had replaced grunge and alternative, and the studios were once again in control. Third Eye Blind was doing its Eddie Vedder impersonation---and it was a good one, or at least it would have fooled Helen Keller---and the folks making money were the ones who always had. (The mp3 was right on the horizon, then, and that really would overturn the order of the biz permanently, the way alternative music had tried to.)
But man. For that summer, or season, or year... Hey, you know what, I'll add "Jeremy" to this, too.
25 August 2012
24 August 2012
23 August 2012
22 August 2012
"You must be older than Super Nintendo to drink in this establishment."[fn1]
fn1: American release date; it was out earlier in Japan.
fn1: American release date; it was out earlier in Japan.
21 August 2012
19 August 2012
18 August 2012
17 August 2012
16 August 2012
Happy 21st birthday, kids conceived after a date involving new release Home Alone!
"Hey, I didn't say it was their date. My best guess, some nice couple got a bad tip on movies opening that weekend, decided to make a road trip out of it to get the bad taste out, and left their preternaturally virile manchild at home to impregnate the easily distracted babysitter. Am I close? And, more to the point of my business, can you follow along if I say them, or do I need to write out those happy hour specials on this napkin for ya?"
... and happy birthday, Youyoung!
"Hey, I didn't say it was their date. My best guess, some nice couple got a bad tip on movies opening that weekend, decided to make a road trip out of it to get the bad taste out, and left their preternaturally virile manchild at home to impregnate the easily distracted babysitter. Am I close? And, more to the point of my business, can you follow along if I say them, or do I need to write out those happy hour specials on this napkin for ya?"
... and happy birthday, Youyoung!
15 August 2012
She wears trainers to bed in case she sleepwalks
"You must be older than Luna Lovegood to drink in this establishment."
"Purely of academic interest. I admit nothing."
"Purely of academic interest. I admit nothing."
Hey, he looks like you, Poindexter!
"You must be older than Mystery Date to drink in this establishment."
Whoops! wrong one. Here:
The angsty kid from Dead Poets Society tries to woo ... well, Mrs. Santos for West Wing fans, Ben Stiller's intended in Meet the Parents to the rest of the world. How could that not work? Well, evidently, if you watch the movie, you'll find out. I dimly going to see this at a movie theater and kind of liking it, but the internet yields I was rather lonely in my favor.
Whoops! wrong one. Here:
The angsty kid from Dead Poets Society tries to woo ... well, Mrs. Santos for West Wing fans, Ben Stiller's intended in Meet the Parents to the rest of the world. How could that not work? Well, evidently, if you watch the movie, you'll find out. I dimly going to see this at a movie theater and kind of liking it, but the internet yields I was rather lonely in my favor.
14 August 2012
13 August 2012
"You must be older than John Madden Football to drink in this establishment."[fn1]
--------
fn1: Something of a caveat here, as there was a MS-DOS legacy program a couple of years before.
--------
.... and happy birthday, Jenn!
fn1: Something of a caveat here, as there was a MS-DOS legacy program a couple of years before.
--------
.... and happy birthday, Jenn!
12 August 2012
"Who you trying to get crazy with, esse? Donchu know I'm loco???"
"You must be older than Cypress Hill to drink in this establishment."
... and happy birthday, Deepa!
... and happy birthday, Deepa!
11 August 2012
What I've felt, what I've known never shined through in what I've shown
"You must be older than The Black Album to drink in this establishment."
Umm... no. This one.
Thirty million copies were sold. Positively mammoth.
Umm... no. This one.
Thirty million copies were sold. Positively mammoth.
10 August 2012
08 August 2012
"Lox and cream cheese on... cinnamon toast? Get it outta here!"
"You must be older than Delirious to drink in this establishment."
This is probably an example of a two-year grace period for the end of the era of "80s movies," but the title to this post actually refers to one of my favorite comic bits of all time. (Probably just a personal quirk.) I can't embed it here, but you can find the reprise (sadly, not as funny the second time around) here.
This is probably an example of a two-year grace period for the end of the era of "80s movies," but the title to this post actually refers to one of my favorite comic bits of all time. (Probably just a personal quirk.) I can't embed it here, but you can find the reprise (sadly, not as funny the second time around) here.
07 August 2012
Be Like Mike
"You must be older than Michael Jordan's time as a Gatorade spokesperson to drink in this establishment."
06 August 2012
"Happy birthday tonight, first baby conceived the night someone was somebody's baby to 'I'm Your Baby Tonight'!"
05 August 2012
Like Mario Puzo, I'm the don / double-you double-you, I'm the shit dot com
"You must be older than the World Wide Web in order to drink in this establishment."
The London Olympics opening ceremonies were, in a word, preposterous. I understand the Beijing envy, but the enormity of that spectacle was a product of China's defining character, being its billion-plus population. Kenneth Branagh played a cheerful tycoon in the middle of a ruined countryside that was the price of the Industrial Revolution---a major British contribution, to be fair, but did no one notice this was essentially the role of Sarumon, if he got to write the ending himself? Sure, the nod to the NHS was good cheeky fun, but children staying up to read scary stories and later teenagers texting each other at night seemed of an unfortunate type. It's as though Danny Boyle solicited hundreds of themes for the evening but picked the winner at random, and that winner was "A Tribute to Children Resisting Their Bedtime."
And social media? Wtf, Britain? To the extent you can take credit for it at all---Al Gore's watching, and his revenge with be wrathful, and swift---surely that credit should be for one of the socially useful applications of the Web. You know, the research applications that are possible with the instantaneous exchange of information, or the ecological benefits of paperless offices. NOT teenagers updating their social profiles! Why take your country's shining moment in the sun---and again, solely to the extent that a discrete Brit and not, you know, the mammoth project undertaken decades earlier by United States military and government agencies---if you're only going to highlight the most corrosive, trivializing application of it?
The London Olympics opening ceremonies were, in a word, preposterous. I understand the Beijing envy, but the enormity of that spectacle was a product of China's defining character, being its billion-plus population. Kenneth Branagh played a cheerful tycoon in the middle of a ruined countryside that was the price of the Industrial Revolution---a major British contribution, to be fair, but did no one notice this was essentially the role of Sarumon, if he got to write the ending himself? Sure, the nod to the NHS was good cheeky fun, but children staying up to read scary stories and later teenagers texting each other at night seemed of an unfortunate type. It's as though Danny Boyle solicited hundreds of themes for the evening but picked the winner at random, and that winner was "A Tribute to Children Resisting Their Bedtime."
And social media? Wtf, Britain? To the extent you can take credit for it at all---Al Gore's watching, and his revenge with be wrathful, and swift---surely that credit should be for one of the socially useful applications of the Web. You know, the research applications that are possible with the instantaneous exchange of information, or the ecological benefits of paperless offices. NOT teenagers updating their social profiles! Why take your country's shining moment in the sun---and again, solely to the extent that a discrete Brit and not, you know, the mammoth project undertaken decades earlier by United States military and government agencies---if you're only going to highlight the most corrosive, trivializing application of it?
04 August 2012
"You gotta have drawn some of the same breath as Paul Brown to drink here."
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Legendary figure---the Cleveland team takes its name from him. The only other team I know to do that ... wait, also a Cleveland team, the old Naps.
I guess it beats "The Lake Fires," or "The Fighting Drew Careys," or whatever.
Legendary figure---the Cleveland team takes its name from him. The only other team I know to do that ... wait, also a Cleveland team, the old Naps.
I guess it beats "The Lake Fires," or "The Fighting Drew Careys," or whatever.
02 August 2012
"I'm so excited; I'm so scared"
Kids conceived after this aired:
... are turning 21 at midnight. They've never existed, even potentially, in a world where irony was a literary and dramatic technique, rather than the inescapable, persistent burden of the entire universe.
"So, what'll it be? I'm guessing PBR."
"So, what'll it be? I'm guessing PBR."
01 August 2012
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