Month: June 2010

Worlds lived. Worlds died. I was never the same.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12. Cover by George Perez

In the (imho, highly overrated) film Garden State, Natalie Portman hands Zach Braff her headphones and tells him, “You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life, I swear.”  She’s referring to The Shins, a band I’ve had little to no interest in ever since I first heard of them, so I can’t exactly say that she’s right.  Then again, I’m too old to have one song “change my life.”  But I’m sure that there’s some song out there that at one point or another did change my life. 

I can’t think of one right now because as much as I love music, I don’t know if a three-minute rock song is as earth-shattering as, say, a book.  And I know that we all have that one book that we picked up, read, absorbed, and were ultimately changed  by.  To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye … there’s a long list of books on a standard high school curriculum that offer that chance.  But what if the book that changed your life wasn’t a piece of literature?  What if it was a comic book?  And what if it was a comic book that wasn’t Watchmen or Dark Knight?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Crisis on Infinite Earths:  the comic series that changed my life.

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Let’s Dance in Style, Let’s Dance for a While

I guess that if you were going to comb through the annals of pop hits that have made their ways into senior proms and yearbooks, you wouldn’t expect to find lyrics about being resilient in the face of Armageddon.  No, your regular prom fare is about being the best of friends to the end or holding onto that girl or guy and never letting go.  Sometimes the song is written specifically to be used at a prom or graduation (I’m looking at you, Vitamin C) but “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” A lyric like that is unexpected.  Unless, that is, you went to high school on Long Island in the 1980s or 1990s, as my class—the Sayville High School Class of 1995—was one of many who dialed up Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for a slow dance at prom.

Running about 3:45 and coming from the 1984 album of the same name, the song was written by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens, who comprised the German synth-pop band (whose original name was actually Forever Young).  Coming out at the height of Duran Duran’s MTV reign and around the same time as U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, “Forever Young” seems like it was an album that got lost in a sea of new wave songs that were ruling the playlists of stations like WLIR (later WDRE) in the early to mid-1980s.  However, though the title track only hit 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, stuck around, becoming a cult hit well into the later part of the decade, nearly three years after its release.  According an article in the June 11, 1988 issue of Billboard (whose text is included in the liner notes to the Singles Collection CD), the song was voted as #1 on a countdown by listeners of WDRE in 1988, and had a definite influence across the Island:

“Forever Young” is so slow and dreamy that Laura Branigan could cover it (and did).  While “Forever” was the top record of 1985 at WPST Trenton, NJ, where it is still played as an oldie, it hasn’t been passed from one hip, top 40 PD to another (Both “Blue Monday” and “I Melt With You” have).  It’s not even played everywhere in its own format.  It has shown up at various Long Island high schools as a class song in recent years.  The song’s popularity among teens may be due to its emphasis on mortality, a running theme in the bopper hits of the ‘70s.

WDRE, the name during the late 1980s and early 1990s of what was once WLIR, a leading modern-rock station based on Long Island.

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Let’s go to the movies

UA the movies in Patchogue, NY after it closed down and before it was demolished.

Time and time again, I find myself mesmerized about how disposable the culture of my childhood really is.  Granted, Hollywood in recent years has been finding ways to pillage and plunder the cartoons and movies that I loved when I was growing up, but when I think of the places where I spent most of my time, they are the malls and multiplexes that seem to be nothing but demonized.  I mean, I guess that people interested in historical preservation really wouldn’t have any interest in saving a concrete multiplex whose design is as bland and nondescript as any of the thousands that have been built, torn down, and rebuilt in the last 40 years; and I guess that said design, like a cookie-cutter multi-use stadium, dictates that it falls without any ceremony.  After all, what replaces the multiplexes and shopping malls are stadium-seating megaplexes and town centres that are upgrades and more aesthetically pleasing to the community.  Nobody misses those eyesores.

Except me, that is.  And probably others in my generation who are products of that transitional part of the late-20th Century when “medium” was “small,” but “mega,” “super,” or “extreme” sizes hadn’t been conceived. You know, when there was still something left of what most people get nostalgic for when they talk about “America” or the “American Dream.” I think the assessment that my generation doesn’t have much to look back on really is only because the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were all about knocking down the “smaller” feel of our parents’ enterprises and creating cold, impersonal places. The place, for me, that will always epitomize the era is the United Artists Patchogue 13 multiplex, which was located on Sunrise Highway, just east of Nicolls Road.  (more…)

A little Hootie never hurt …

Arguably the biggest album of 1995, "Cracked Rear View" sold 13 million copies.

A few years ago, the school I was teaching at did “decades day” as one of their spirit week days.  Quite a number of my fellow teachers were around my age, so I was not the only person who wore “’90s attire”.  However, most of those colleges of mine were ex-jocks who somehow managed to squeeze themselves back into old varsity jackets.  Having never played a sport in high school I didn’t have a varsity jacket, so I kind of “grunged” it up with a flannel shirt, some jeans, a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and a pair of black Doc Martens.

Of course, while the flannel and the NIN T-shirt were authentic, they really didn’t represent who I was or what I wore in high school (in fact, I didn’t get a pair of Docs until after college).  The flannel was from J.Crew (and is now the smock  my son uses for art time in daycare) and while I do have most of Trent Reznor’s recordings from Pretty Hate Machine through The Downward Spiral, I was never a hardcore fan.  But a pair of antique-washed jeans with a braided belt, white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, all from The Gap, would have been lost on my students. 

And truth be told, if I wanted to fully represent my 1990s self, I probably should have worn one of my Hootie and the Blowfish tour T-shirts.

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