I realized that, as of late, my posts have been a little heavy on the nostalgia. While one of the key motifs, if you will, of my blog is paying tribute to the pop culture of my past, I don't want to write about the past so much that folks will start to wonder if I've left my house since 1992. In other words, it's time for granny to get off the porch, quit bitching about "kids these days" and write about some of the things I'm enjoying this very moment, in 2009. Besides writing about 1989, that is.
Music: City and Colour - Bring Me Your Love (best album of 2008, according to me)
M.I.A. - "Paper Planes" (DFA Remix)
Guns N' Roses - "Better" (new single from Chinese Democracy)
Movies: Slumdog Millionaire
American Teen (now out on DVD)
Books: Don Cherry - Hockey Stories and Stuff
Slash - Slash
Food and Drink: Pad thai noodles from the "new" (old) Green Mango
Cranberry juice and lime Perrier
Fashion: My new sunglasses, the cost of which I will avoid mentioning here, as I'm still a little
embarrassed to have shelled out so much for something I could potentially
leave behind on a bus.
Fun: Second City improv classes (highly addictive)
Guitar Hero World Tour (especially when I get to drum...or sing Pat Benatar)
Monday, January 26, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Booths of My Youth
As my most seasoned readers will recall, the name of this blog is a reference to the immortal words uttered by Billy Hicks in the climactic scene of St. Elmo's Fire. That film was iconic of another generation, but the phrase "our time on the edge" resonates for mine as well. There are a lot of ways in which kids my age were living on the edge of a new era. Take, for example, the realm of technology. At my high school, we were the last class to learn how to type on typewriters in Grade 9 Business. The school set up an internet lab in our library the year that I graduated, but practically no one I knew I had e-mail. I'm pretty positive we were the last teenagers to go through their entire high school years without the "information superhighway" (as it was then known - did Al Gore coin that corny phrase?) being an integral part of our daily lives. I got my first e-mail account the summer before I started undergrad -- hard to believe how much has changed since.
Then there's the cell phone revolution...it goes without saying that cell phone use, never mind ownership, was entirely out of the question for teens in the early to mid-1990s. My family even held the touch-tone revolution at bay for as long as possible. Our collection of rotary-dial phones were quite charming, although it got increasingly frustrating to obtain movie times, concert tickets, or basic customer service of any kind.
If any "young folk" are reading this (unlikely, but you never know), you're probably wondering, what in God's name did we do without cell phones and text messaging? Well, back then, it was all about the exciting and sometimes dangerous cultural institution known as the Pay Phone.
We used them everywhere -- at school, in our dorms, at the mall, in dimly lit alleys and totally sketchy vestibules...it was the only option we had. And what's happened to them now? A few months ago, I began an investigation into the fate of the Pay Phone in downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, the results weren't pretty. But they remain on our streets as a reminder that not so long ago, we were still living on the edge of a technological revolution that had yet to happen. We didn't know how behind the times we were. And that was OK, believe it or not.
Here's a few from my collection, which I hope to expand before these cultural landmarks are erased from our urban landscape...
Then there's the cell phone revolution...it goes without saying that cell phone use, never mind ownership, was entirely out of the question for teens in the early to mid-1990s. My family even held the touch-tone revolution at bay for as long as possible. Our collection of rotary-dial phones were quite charming, although it got increasingly frustrating to obtain movie times, concert tickets, or basic customer service of any kind.
If any "young folk" are reading this (unlikely, but you never know), you're probably wondering, what in God's name did we do without cell phones and text messaging? Well, back then, it was all about the exciting and sometimes dangerous cultural institution known as the Pay Phone.
We used them everywhere -- at school, in our dorms, at the mall, in dimly lit alleys and totally sketchy vestibules...it was the only option we had. And what's happened to them now? A few months ago, I began an investigation into the fate of the Pay Phone in downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, the results weren't pretty. But they remain on our streets as a reminder that not so long ago, we were still living on the edge of a technological revolution that had yet to happen. We didn't know how behind the times we were. And that was OK, believe it or not.
Here's a few from my collection, which I hope to expand before these cultural landmarks are erased from our urban landscape...
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Growing Up Grunge, Part. 2: Let's Back This Up a Bit
In a previous post ("Growing Up Grunge, Pt. 1"), I reflected on what it means to have come of age not just in the 1990s, but with the 1990s -- turning 11 in 1990 and 20 in 1999. I've been doing some more thinking about this lately, in particular about why the explosion of grunge had such a huge impact on kids my age. I should specify that I'm referring to when grunge music hit the mainstream -- that generation-altering year of 1991. It had, of course, been around since the mid-1980s. But for many kids like myself - who didn't have bad-ass older siblings and grew up in a sleepy small town - grunge did not enter our vocabulary until Nevermind and Ten hit the charts. To be honest, I was still pretty clueless about Nirvana and Pearl Jam even then. They were just so far removed from the poppier than pop Top 40 music I'd been grooving to all through grade school. And it is to that music, and the pop culture in general of the fabulous twilight of the 1980s that I will now turn.
Earlier I made a cursory list of grunge era icons, eg. Doc Martens, thrift store shopping, mosh pits, greasy hair, flannel, heroin chic, rock star suicides, and so on and so forth. Keeping those in mind, I'm going to now conjure up a similar list reflecting pop life as I knew it from about 1989 to 1991:
(For the full flashback experience, I recommend cueing up Waiting For a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl. Hit play now...)
OK, so here goes: Madonna's Like a Prayer (first cassette I ever bought), Pretty Woman, Wilson Phillips, Beverly Hills, 90210, movies starring the Coreys (Haim and Feldman, of course), Cotton Ginny, New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul, The Wonder Years, hair scrunchies, sticker collections, Amy Grant's Heart in Motion, Salt-N-Pepa, chintz leggings (hello first day of junior high), Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Taylor Dayne, Milli Vannilli, my parents' Chevrolet Caprice, Murphy Brown, Parker Lewis Can't Lose...
And, oh yeah, the Gulf War. And the recession. But we won't get into that. Actually, maybe I will, if only to note that it seems bizarr-o to me that pretty much all of the pop culture that I can recollect from the "turn of the '90s" is so insanely fluffy, when the news was so bleak. But then again, I was only ten years old, and my biggest concern was whether Jordan Knight would be willing to wait for me until I was legal to marry him.
Point being that you cannot find a pop culture experience farther removed from the grunge era than that which immediately preceded it -- especially as experienced as a kid. Then 1991 came along. Did everything seem different only because we became teenagers? Or was it a real watershed? All I know is, Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbors and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves were a friggin' far cry from Pearl Jam and Reservoir Dogs. But they existed in the same moment.
There has to be some lasting scars on my generation from being forced to sacrifice our love of smiley, squeaky-clean pop idols like New Kids on the Block and Paula Abdul in exchange for the angry, brooding and bedraggled likes of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. By late 1991, everything we loved as kids just was NOT cool anymore. There wasn't any time for sentimental good-byes. But maybe that's what becoming a teenager is all about -- leaving happy fuzzy childhood behind for a dark, uncertain, and possibly painful future. Interestingly enough, for kids of my generation, grunge took over the music scene at the exact moment we needed to articulate just how much it sucked to be a teenager. Therefore, I would argue, it's even more potent for us than for any other demographic in history. How's that for a sweeping statement? It feels right to me.
Earlier I made a cursory list of grunge era icons, eg. Doc Martens, thrift store shopping, mosh pits, greasy hair, flannel, heroin chic, rock star suicides, and so on and so forth. Keeping those in mind, I'm going to now conjure up a similar list reflecting pop life as I knew it from about 1989 to 1991:
(For the full flashback experience, I recommend cueing up Waiting For a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl. Hit play now...)
OK, so here goes: Madonna's Like a Prayer (first cassette I ever bought), Pretty Woman, Wilson Phillips, Beverly Hills, 90210, movies starring the Coreys (Haim and Feldman, of course), Cotton Ginny, New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul, The Wonder Years, hair scrunchies, sticker collections, Amy Grant's Heart in Motion, Salt-N-Pepa, chintz leggings (hello first day of junior high), Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Taylor Dayne, Milli Vannilli, my parents' Chevrolet Caprice, Murphy Brown, Parker Lewis Can't Lose...
And, oh yeah, the Gulf War. And the recession. But we won't get into that. Actually, maybe I will, if only to note that it seems bizarr-o to me that pretty much all of the pop culture that I can recollect from the "turn of the '90s" is so insanely fluffy, when the news was so bleak. But then again, I was only ten years old, and my biggest concern was whether Jordan Knight would be willing to wait for me until I was legal to marry him.
Point being that you cannot find a pop culture experience farther removed from the grunge era than that which immediately preceded it -- especially as experienced as a kid. Then 1991 came along. Did everything seem different only because we became teenagers? Or was it a real watershed? All I know is, Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbors and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves were a friggin' far cry from Pearl Jam and Reservoir Dogs. But they existed in the same moment.
There has to be some lasting scars on my generation from being forced to sacrifice our love of smiley, squeaky-clean pop idols like New Kids on the Block and Paula Abdul in exchange for the angry, brooding and bedraggled likes of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. By late 1991, everything we loved as kids just was NOT cool anymore. There wasn't any time for sentimental good-byes. But maybe that's what becoming a teenager is all about -- leaving happy fuzzy childhood behind for a dark, uncertain, and possibly painful future. Interestingly enough, for kids of my generation, grunge took over the music scene at the exact moment we needed to articulate just how much it sucked to be a teenager. Therefore, I would argue, it's even more potent for us than for any other demographic in history. How's that for a sweeping statement? It feels right to me.
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