high school

Binge and Purge

I am pretty sure that if you asked him, the greatest moment of my friend Brendan’s adolescence was his first Metallica concert. He and his friend were both members of the official fan club and were able to get front row center seats for the band’s concert at Jones Beach in May 1994. I admit that’s pretty impressive. The closest I ever got to any performance like that was second-row seats to Les Miserables that same spring; otherwise, my concert-going life has been relegated to what’s available or what I can afford–usually bleeders.

Anyway, this wound up being the culmination of a few years of Metallica fandom but also in a huge year for the band. In 1991, they had released Metallica (otherwise known as “The Black Album”) and toured nearly non-stop up until they recorded and released Load in 1996, an album that is so divisive, it’s probably worth its own entry. In the middle of all of this touring, the band released something that most bands do when they put out a successful record–a live album.

But it wasn’t just a live album; when you are the biggest band in the world, you release the biggest live boxed set the world has ever seen. Released at the tail end of 1993 and called Live Shit: Binge and Purge, Metallica’s album came in a small trunk and included three CDs, three VHS tapes, a T-shirt, a booklet, stickers, and a fake backstage pass (there was another version released with cassettes instead of CDs and subsequent rereleases have replaced the VHS tapes with DVDs). It retailed for $89.95, which was a lot of money then and actually still is a lot of money for a boxed set. You’d have to be a crazy hardcore fan to want to spend that much money.

Which, to be honest, is the nature of boxed sets. In fact, Barenaked Ladies even wrote a song called “Box Set” (on Gordon) wherein they satirize the product’s bloated nature:

Disc One
It’s where we’ve begun, it’s all of greatest hits,
and if you are a fan then you know that you’ve already got ’em.

Disc Two
It was all brand new, an album’s worth of songs,
but we had to leave the whole disc blank ’cause
some other label bought ’em.

Disc Three
This is really me in a grade school play;
I had about a hundred thousand lines but of course I forgot ’em. …

Disc Four
Never released before, and you can tell why.
it’s just some demos I recorded in my basement.

Disc Five
I was barely alive, I was coughing up a lung,
so they had to use a special computer as my replacement.

Disc Six
A dance remix, so I can catch the latest trend
and it’ll make you scratch your head and wonder
where my taste went.

And they can definitely be hit or miss. The two Springsteen boxed sets that I have–Tracks and Live 1975-1985–are well worth their price tags. But for the most part, the average boxed set is an overdone affair with a good $20 less than its price tag. Live Shit: Binge & Purge didn’t suffer its price, eventually selling 15 million copies.

For my friends who were into the band (and to a lesser extent, myself) one of us obtaining this monster was a cause for celebration. I’d heard live albums beofre, but a band we so favorited had never done anything like this, so putting an entire Metallica concert into the CD player and blasting it like we had tickets was awesome. Plus, the band was playing music we hadn’t heard before or that we had heard of but had found hard to obtain. I personally taped “Last Caress,” “Am I Evil,” and “Stone Cold Crazy,” and would go onto crib whatever I could from Brendan’s various bootlegs, imports, and singles (well, until Garage, Inc. came out in 1998 and replaced my need for the worn-out tapes in my car’s glove compartment). And between that and “Breadfan,” I was good to go. Brendan wasn’t and proceeded to collect any import or bootleg he could get his hands on.

If anything, like the nights they capture for posterity, live albums are time capsules and Live Shit: Binge and Purge is no exception. It’s Metallica’s last gasp before they reinvented themselves as a Nineties band. If I listened to it now, I’d probably be able to picture sitting in my friend’s room reading magazines and talking about hockey while James Hetfield grunted and roared away.

A Banquet, a Song, a Date, a Mug

A few months ago, I was doing the dishes after breakfast, and after putting my coffee mug in the drying rack, I heard it crash to the floor. I sighed and grabbed the broom and dustpan, and while sweeping it up, got annoyed. I was annoyed at myself for not being careful, but also annoyed that a mug I had owned for twenty years was now gone.

The black coffee mug with a gold rim and “Sayville High School ’95” was the favor from my junior banquet, which took place on April 18, 1994. I honestly don’t know why it was called a banquet and not a prom–I suspect it had something to do with the seniors not wanting the juniors to call our dance a “prom” because my high school was all about that petty sort of crap–but it was the first formal school dance I ever attended. In fact, if you want to get technical, it was my first date.

It is shocking to absolutely no one that I was an incredibly late bloomer. Oh sure, I knew as early as elementary school that I liked girls, but at sixteen, I had not evolved socially beyond the awkwardness I had around girls when I was twelve. I could control my behavior and wasn’t as obnoxious or immature in the presence of a pretty girl, but I still had ridiculous crushes on girls who were way out of my league, and even as late as college it took signals brighter than the average Times Square billboard for me to pick up on the fact that someone found me even marginally attractive. In fact, at that point, my pursuit of the opposite sex amounted to asking out my crush in the ninth grade (and getting rejected) and getting friendzoned by someone prior to Christmas break, so the idea that I’d actually get a date for a dance was pretty ridiculous.

The junior banquet, though, was the social event of the year–at least for me, anyway–and because of that I felt that finding a date was necessary. Okay, there was no stated obligation to find a date, but I definitely felt some sort of pressure to make sure I had a companion for the evening. Maybe it was because my friends were getting dates or maybe because the dance was formal. Personally, I blame our class’s choice of a theme song: “Oh What a Night.” (more…)

Protected: Pop Culture Affidavit, Episode 13 — Wait, I Wrote a Novel?

Being Michael Grates

About a week or two ago, I came across a few articles filled with emotional hand-wringing on the part of the generation often referred to as Millenials. I read about how there is a generational conflict between this younger generation, which seems to be dismayed that the world doesn’t think they are entitled to anything; and older generations, who wish these kids would get over themselves. It’s accompanied by talk about the uphill battle this generation faces as it enters a very touchy employment situation–the job market, after all, is terrible–and will have an enormous amount of student loan debt. There is also the sentiment of “You created this mess and we inherited it.”

I found myself thinking about how Millennials need to get over themselves and how they’re all entitled brats, but then I couldn’t help but be reminded of two decades ago when Generation X seemed to be facing the same problems. I am sure that your average Millennial will tell me otherwise, but it seems that there is something universal here: the up-and-coming generation takes crap from the older generation. And I also couldn’t help but watch Reality Bites, the 1994 Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke film that attempted to capture the struggle that particular group of twentysomethings was going through at the time. Watching it again–and I watch it every once in a while–I knew that I would have a slightly different perspective and perhaps even view at least one of the characters a different way. Not surprisingly, the character I seemed to sympathize with more than I did when I first saw the movie as a teenager was Michael Grates. (more…)

“Generation X” is … (a post from 1994)

Before I get to the meat of this, I should provide some preamble. The post that will go up later in the week is titled “Being Michael Grates,” wherein I take a look at Ben Stiller’s character from Reality Bites from the perspective of someone who is in his mid-thirties and see, much like Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club and Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything … how much that perspective has changed. As I was writing that piece, I thought of a piece I wrote in my high school newspaper where I referenced the movie in some screed about then-current stereotypes about teenagers and twenty-somethings of the day, who were labeled collectively as “Generation X” (taken from the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name). I thought of quoting an excerpt from it in the post and then I decided, why don’t I just reprint it?

So, this is from the November 1994 (Volume 4, Issue 1) issue of Voices Inside, the then-student newspaper for Sayville High School. I was seventeen years old, and it was the first in a regular “column” I had (read: gave to myself since I was made editor-in-chief) called “@#$&!”, which is an early precursor to this blog. Perhaps one day I’ll write about that and “From the Nosebleeds,” the column I had in college. But until then, enjoy this and come back later in the week for another all-new post as well as next week’s episode of the podcast, which also touches on Reality Bites. Until then, here is the original column in its entirety (with a few punctuation errors fixed). (more…)

Self-Righteous

The watershed moments in your life rarely come with a script. Oh sure, you have your major milestones and accomplishments but the moments of true epiphany are the most random, often happening when you least expect it. One such moment in my life came before a club meeting during my senior year of high school. I was helping pass out agendas and had left my backpack on my seat. A friend of mine, Jim, was a fellow officer in the club happened to see my Walkman and out of curiosity, pulled it out of my bag and gave it a listen. I returned to the table in time to see a look of complete confusion make its way across his face.

“Give me that,” I said, snatching the Walkman out of his hand. Jim didn’t respond, and I put my headphones on to hear what had prompted such a strange look. Playing near full blast was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Luckily, the meeting soon began and Jim didn’t care enough to mention it again or to anyone else, and needless to say that had me relieved because while I brushed the incident off, I felt the same sort of weird guilt you’d feel as if you’d been caught masturbating. This was music I had been listening to when nobody was around, an act of musical self-pleasure that I kept hidden from the guys I talked heavy metal with at the lunch table where for all they knew, I was genuinely impressed that Jeff tracked down a Megadeth bootleg or that Brian finally acquired the studio version of “Breadfan” when he bought the Japanese import single for “One.” Had he mentioned it to the group of people we hung out with, I would have been mercilessly ridiculed, like the time they found my copy of Born in the U.S.A. and wrote “Nice ass!” on the cover.

I probably shouldn’t have cared, to be honest. What’s wrong with having your own tastes? Who cares what other people think, right? But I was an individual with serious self-esteem problems and a need for approval that meant not only did I really want to seem like I was cool, but I was quite possibly the easiest target for ridicule. I will spare you the vulgar nicknames, the perfume sprayings, and other jokes in my honor and say that though Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield’s glory years were a good thirty years behind them at that point, my listening to the Righteous Brothers tape I’d borrowed from my mother, especially “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” had a perfectly reasonable explanation: Top Gun. (more…)

Three O’Clock High

My movie viewing history as a child and adolescent seems to have two phases. Starting from when I was very young, I have always loved science fiction and action movies. That shouldn’t be a surprise, considering I was born the year Star Wars came out and spent the better part of my youth watching cartoons that were used to sell action and sci-fi based toys. My father, his friend (my “uncle”) Chuck, my Uncle Lou, and quite a number of other family members happily fostered my love for those things through buying me toys and making me copies of those movies, or not balking at the fact that in the fourth and fifth grade I was watching R-rated movies.

But as I went through high school, I began to become more interested in another genre, which was the teen movie. I’d known about the types of movies for a while and had owned a copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off since it first came out on video, but before I graduated, I had probably seen every movie starring John Cusack or directed by John Hughes. The person or people who deserve the credit for this are not the same who got me into a galaxy far, far away, because none of them absolutely loved Say Anything … the way I did (though nobody seemed to think it was weird that a 15-year-old boy wanted to rent Porky’s). I lay the blame for my love of the teen movie genre at someone I didn’t even know: the programming director of WPIX.

Now, here is where I probably should talk about how I first watched Three O’Clock High on a random Saturday afternoon on WPIX and that prompted me to rent the uncensored version of the movie and from there I was completely hooked on this little gem of a film, but that would be a lie. That’s because I actually saw Three O’Clock High in the theater, which should have been a sign that I would become fully ensconced in teen angst flicks within a few years, but in all honesty I went to see it with my friend Tom on Columbus Day weekend of 1987 because we had nothing better to do that day and the commercial had been running on television for the better part of a couple of weeks, so we asked my dad for some money and rode our bikes up to Sayville Theater to take in a very cheap matinee.

My dad was on the phone when I asked him for the money, although I wasn’t deliberately timing it that way because the cost of a matinee for two people at Sayville Theater in those days came in under ten bucks, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to get the money. He reached for his wallet and began describing what he thought was the movie we were going to see: a guy has to protect a daughter and she’s in danger, which was the plot of the Scott Glenn version of Man on Fire. I corrected him and he stopped telling my neighbor what the movie was about and looked at us incredulously.

“You’re going to see the one about the fight?” he asked.

“Uh … yeah,” I said.

My father looked at both of us and let out a groan, as if we had just committed the most disappointing act a couple of ten-year-old boys ever could have done. I mean, I might as well have told him that we were going to the salon to learn how to braid the hair of my sister’s My Little Pony collection.

And yes, Three O’Clock High is about a fight. Casey Siemaszko plays Jerry Mitchell, an overachieving geek who raises the ire of Buddy Revell (played by Richard Tyson, who is probably best known for being the villain in Kindergarten Cop) because … well, Jerry touches him and Buddy hates being touched. (more…)

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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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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The Yearbook Myth

One commercial that stuck with me from the time I first saw it as a kid until I became a teenager was an ad for McDonald’s entitled “Great Year!” It features the antics of Central Junior High School’s yearbook staff as they attempt to cover all of the great and crazy things that happened during the course of the school year and then meet at McDonald’s to celebrate their success.

Watch the minute-long ad and you’ll see a portrait of a junior high school that in 1983 or whenever it was originally shot had to be the coolest place on Earth. Everyone gets along, someone walks through the hallway dressed as a strawberry, and even the high pressure moments are filled with a goofiness that only comes when you are selling hamburgers. I don’t have to do much to convince anyone that my junior high experience was not really like this. Had “Great Year!” been a real reflection of what I remember, there would have been footage of a gym teacher cutting gum out of someone’s hair, two guys blowing snot rockets all over the school store while the people who worked there gagged and yelled at them to stop, and one kid looking scared out of his mind while another threatened to beat the ever-loving snot out of him if he did even the slightest thing wrong. Or maybe that’s just my take.

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