Month: June 2011

So no one told you life was gonna be this way

I just started participating in a Facebook “challenge” (meme?) called the “30 Day Song Challenge.”  For the next month, I have to post one song per day to my wall and each day has a different caveat.  For instance, Day One was “Your Favorite Song” (for the record: “Summer, Highland Falls” by Billy Joel) and Day Twenty-Seven is “Song You Wish You Could Play on an Instrument” (I have yet to share this one).  I got bored one night and wrote a list down in a notebook, although I’m sure those songs will change somewhat when I go to post them.  Day Seven’s song is “Song That Reminds You of an Event.”  Now, I would have used my wedding song but that is already being used for Day Twenty-Three, “Song For Your Wedding,” so I wound up being stuck trying to think about something else.  Strangely enough, the first song that popped into my head was “I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts.

If you are unfamiliar with the song’s title, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say, it’s the theme from Friends.  Friends premiered in the fall of 1994, back when NBC’s Must See TV lineup consisted of Mad About You at 8:00, Seinfeld at 9:00, and ER at 10:00.  Friends took the 8:30 slot and a very short-lived and largely forgotten Dabney Coleman sitcom called Madman of the People premiered at 9:30.  The night for NBC was a powerhouse because CBS was premiering Due South and Chicago Hope and ABC had Matlock along with the culturally significant but ratings anemic My So-Called Life.  But the time winter and spring rolled around, Friends was the breakout hit and everything that had been new and in direct competition was basically scorched earth (I love MSCL but even the most ardent of fans will admit that Angela Chase and company got their asses handed to them).  Friends was one of the few Generation X-oriented shows/films that actually connected, so much so that by the time Ross got off of a plane at Kennedy Airport with Julie on his arm while Rachel waited unknowingly with flowers and new feelings, you couldn’t escape the show.  There were posters, T-shirts, magazines covers, a hairstyle, and that theme song.

It’s somehow ironic that “I’ll Be There For You” because so popular because at the previous fall’s Emmy Awards, Jason Alexander had done a song and dance number about TV theme songs because they were considered to be a dying breed, and kind of still are.  After all, the last TV theme song written specifically for television that charted I think was this very song.  In fact, I think this took most people by surprise because by the spring of 1995 when Friends-mania began gaining serious traction, the entire version of the song had yet to be released or even recorded.  The Rembrandts had recorded a one-minute TV version of “I’ll Be There For You” for the show’s opening credits and wound up rushing the full three-minute version of the song onto their album because there was serious demand by people for its radio airplay.

I was still listening to WBAB in the evenings while I did homework and the station had been receiving requests for the song.  Now, radio stations weren’t going to just play a one-minute television theme song, so some deejay decided to just loop it three times to create a three-minute song (according to Wikipedia, said deejay was in Nashville).  WBAB began playing this as a way to placate the listeners, even though I’m sure there were plenty of real rock and roll fans who wound up being disgusted.  As I sat in my bedroom doing my homework that May, I managed to catch a playing of the song and hit record on my stereo (having a tape in the cassette deck ready to record stuff was still a common practice of mine at the time).  Then I played it over and over and over, to the point where I nearly wore the tape out.  This, of course, was in the days before I would go and find out via the Internet who sang the song and could download it for about a buck, so I had to wait for the opportunity to take a weekend trip to the mall to see if it was on CD.

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Deathstroke, the Punisher? (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twelve)

I think that one of the drawbacks of Marv Wolfman’s sixteen year run on the various Titans books is that he didn’t do much as far as take time off.  Sure, that is definitely an advantage because he was able to really craft his core group of characters and have them grow in a way that seemed organic, but at the same time there were clearly periods where he was, for lack of a better word, running out of gas.  In the next couple of months, I’ll definitely be getting to one of those times as I start moving toward New Titans #100 and I get to go through at least a couple of years’ worth of Titans stories that aren’t considered the best of the bunch.

When Wolfman did step away for a moment and leave the books in someone else’s hands–like Louise Simonson, who did the Red Star Storyline I looked at last time around–the books weren’t necessarily better, but they were a refreshing “pinch hit”.  At the same time Simonson was handling Red Star and Cyborg over in New Titans, Steven Grant–he of the Punisher mini-series from the 1980s–was brought on to do several issues of Deathstroke.  I think that Wolfman was out on his honeymoon or something when these issues were due, or at least he felt he needed that break from Total Chaos.  At any rate, the Titans books moved along pretty well during this time, although I think Grant had an easier job than Simonson because he wasn’t dealing with all of the soap opera-type of stuff that had been moving its way through the Titans books.

Deathstroke was at the end of a long storyline that culminated in Cheshire’s destruction of Quarac and Slade’s telling off the U.S. government.  The Cheshire conspiracy had essentially been started back in the very first issue of the series so you are basically talking about nearly two years of story that wrapped up right before Grant came in.  Instead of starting something that was long and involved (which we will get with the “World Tour” storyline that starts with issue #26), Grant does one-offs and two-parters that remind us that the book is meant to first and foremost be an action comic.  I’d say that in ways it is definitely trying to reflect The Punisher but whereas The Punisher is a vigilante with a mission, Deathstroke is a mercenary/hitman and takes jobs.  It serves to further solidify his supporting cast (characters like the weapons supplier Squirrel and a contact named Frannie) and makes for some solid reading.

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Oh my Power Lords …

“Push his secret action button and he’ll move, turn, twist and change from human to the Power Lord.  With powers to save the world from Arkus, The Evil Dictator.  And only you can control him.”

Uh … what?

Our nostalgia for the 1980s and its various toy lines tends to stay with the stuff that is considered “landmark” or awesome:  G.I. Joe, The Transformers, Masters of the Universe, The Thundercats.  But for every one of those toy lines, there’s something that never really leaves a mark.  While I was reading an old comic book the other day, I noticed that the back cover had an ad for Power Lords, which Revell released in 1983.  Based on the timing and the size of the action figure produced, I think that they were trying to compete with He-Man; and the science fiction back story suggests that perhaps they were also taking a shot at Return of the Jedi, which had come out that May.

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Losers Bizhub, Winners Collate.

Though it is more than 25 years old and as a whole a pretty uneven movie, when I think about my job being accurately portrayed (or at least lampooned) in film, I think of the 1984 Nick Nolte film Teachers. One scene, in particular, has always worked and will always work. Mr. Stiles, nicknamed “Ditto” because of the amount of worksheets he produces, is in the main office using an old-fashioned mimeograph when another teacher approaches him and yells, “You’re always hogging that machine!” She then proceeds to squirt ink on his face and smack him around before being physically hauled away.

Now, I’ve never attacked another faculty member with ink, but I definitely can say that there are moments when I have become violently angry at a copier, using several four-letter words that are wholly inappropriate for a classroom but okay for the teacher’s lounge whenever the Risograph craps out in the middle of making 120 copies of my four-page, double-sided worksheet. Most office environments no longer have archaic copying systems like mine and are able to invest in something like a Bizhub; however, your average public school is not most offices. Since we cannot afford the Cadillac of copiers, we duplicate, we collate, we stack, we sort, and we manually staple everything we produce.

I am sure there is no formal statistic for the amount of time teachers spend putting papers together, but ask any teacher and he will tell you that at least a couple of times each marking period, his planning period is spent with the pages of a worksheet packet spread out among the rows of desks in his classroom in the correct order so he can move from page to page and stack then, then staple the stack together and move on to the next. I’ve done this dance myself, both in my classroom and at home and usually it takes me as long as two or three hours to put everything together.

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