Gen-Xers complaining about the loss of “their MTV” (the one that showed videos) is now itself, a joke. Gen X-enters-midlife inaugural series “Portlandia” went so far as to feature an episode where Portland-based Xers united with our Cronkite (Kurt Loder), and our Barbara Walters (Tabitha Soren), and our ready-made music-guru buddy (Matt Pinfield) to stage a coup against the channel’s current Gen-Z-oriented, “Teen Mom”-pushing programming director.

She doesn’t care about your nostalgia, Harms

It’s hard to sell someone else on their loss. No one, reasonably, wants to hear about how great the party (or New York City, or San Francisco) was just before they got there. So, perhaps against type to my generation, I’d like to not say what the later-born lost because they were born after MTV was paved over with boy-band-friendly, gonad-vaporizing “TRL” and insipid reality shows gone horribly wrong (What hath “The Real World” wrought?).

Instead, I’d like to recall what humanity gained in that early era of videos. In this post, I’d like to recall and celebrate a director who laid down a gauntlet to say “We could do this ‘video’ thing with artistry and daring, like this.” The director was Englishman David Mallet who, in his visionary collaborations with David Bowie made profoundly memorable, challenging, and daring videos. Bowie and Mallett’s videos hinted that the medium could be more than musical ads to sell records. It could be an art form unto itself.

Foreword: I’ve had this post incomplete in my drafts folder for many months, but the recent passing of the Eve of the DWotD (Doo-Wop of the Damned), Ronnie Spector, on January 12^th has urged me to finally finish this one off. In memoriam.

An important part of my musical taste that intersects at horror, maudlin sentimentality, oceans of reverb, and beautiful harmonies deserves a name. I dub it the Doo-Wop of the Damned (DWotD). It’s not a common taste, really, but I was trying to remember how it formed in me, so I thought I’d write down its recipe.

I’ve also created a playlist to sample some of the music discussed here:

“The Automat” is a joyous film that recalls the arrival and departure of the automatic restaurant, the automat, Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia and New York. Guided by and framed with interviews with H&H aficionado Mel Brooks, the story of a scrappy restaurant that believed in good food for the people, all people, in a beautiful environment was nostalgic, tender, and sad. As Brooks recounts: you could never make it today, it makes no sense to accounting that something so naive and good and cheap could ever be conjured again.

As we shuffled out my seat neighbor leaned over and confided: “They didn’t mention it, but the mashed potatoes were pretty darn good, too.”

In my memories, there was one SNL sketch that I considered to be absurdly funny, but I never could find it on YouTube or any of SNL’s streaming services.

It was the 2^nd, of what would become very, very, many, appearance of Alec Baldwin on the program. Here, he portrayed a 60’s-esque crimefighter: The Mimic! A few years ago I found that the showrunner Justin Roiland of Rick & Morty fame was also a fan and lamented its loss:

Why can't I find "the mimic" SNL sketch with @AlecBaldwin online anywhere? Been looking non stop since 5pm today #help

— Justin Roiland (@JustinRoiland) November 7, 2017

And, at long last, I can share it with you: The Mimic…and more.

Last week, Olivia Newton-John died and, for the record, it was a sad moment for me. Ms. Newton-John’s is one of those iconic faces that emerge from the fog as I started becoming aware of the culture around me at the dawn of the 1980’s. There was Pac-Man, E.T., the “Jaws” theme, the Mandrell Sisters, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Kenny and Dolly, the Smurfs, Debbie Harry and:

• Newton-John as Kira in Xanadu
• Lou Ferrigno/Bill Bixby in/as The Hulk
• Marc Singer and Tanya Roberts in The Beastmaster
• Sam J. Jones, Brian Blessed (and Freddie Mercury’s voice) in Flash Gordon

Looking back at most of those shows, they were not what one could call, well, good or high art.

Nevertheless, I watched them and, given the fact that I still remember them, I must have watched them lots of times. And that means my (poor?) mother must have watched them with me lots of times, too.

My mom never had, and still doesn’t have, snobbery about films and TV shows. If the people are nice and are doing nice things, she’s supportive. If nasty people are doing nasty things, she awaits their come-uppance after hissing. If the adventure makes your heart skip a beat, she’s willing to suspend her disbelief. While my snob reflex is complaining about cheap emotional manipulation, my mom gladly enjoys the feeling she was engineered to feel. And because of this, she winds up enjoying a great many things from a great many genres. And this has always been so.

Luckily, despite the fact that these shows were, well, not all that great, and because my mom was quite tolerant of their, eh, foibles, I got to appreciate some great, bad movies. I suppose that’s where my tolerance — if not outright enjoyment — of camp ("Mommie Dearest"), failed ambitious movies (Lynch’s Dune), and howlingly bad movies comes from (the aforementioned, Flash Gordon).

I suppose I want to say: I loved watching sci-fi and fantasy shows (of dubious merit) as a kid, with my mom, in that quaint house in Cypress, Texas at the dawn of the decade that would define my childhood. And I’m glad that the memories of enjoying camp nonsense together with my mom featured the glorious feathered blonde hair, the dentist’s dream smile, and china-blue eyes of Ms. Newton-John (and a space-disco psychedelic soundtrack by ELO). And I’m sad that ON-J’s death means that someday those memories will be washed in time. But for a brief moment, let us shine like neon in Xanadu.

In a previous post, I went heavy on the nostalgia about my mom and I enjoying trash sci-fi in the beginning of the Reagan era. The object of my reminiscence was Xanadu, but I thought I’d write about another favorite: 1981’s Flash Gordon.

In around 1992, I heard Frente!’s (hereafter, Frente), cover of New Order’s masterpiece, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Stripped down to singer Angie Hart’s vocals and guitarist Simon Austin’s light guitar arrangement, it dangled like a bauble amid the rest of the 120 Minutes slate driven, in no small part, by the incredibly photogenic Hart playing to the camera.

The cover was part of their name-making Marvin the Album that was used to spread Frente from being an Australian band to being a folky, fun band with international reach. In Summer 1996, after my first year at college where I’d been introduced to the Sundays, Frente returned with their second album: Shape which kept Hart’s angelic voice, but layered it into an ambitiously energetic, complex, Brian Wilson-esque psychedelia that, sadly, never got its due.

Let’ un-forget Frente’s Shape.

In the early 2000s, I often bounced between San Jose and Austin. Oftentimes, I’d spend the night in a hotel on Sunday night before catching the early morning flight back to the West Coast (R.I.P. “Nerd Bird”). As part of the Sunday-night return ritual, I would catch the airing of Fox’s “Malcolm In the Middle.” One episode has stuck with me across all these years because it said something revolutionary about class in America, gender relations, and features a blistering monologue about nascent incel-culture delivered fantastically.

In the exposition of episode 207, “Robbery (2000),” the working-class-to-working-poor mother of the series, Lois, portrayed by Jane Kaczmarek, is working the evening shift at her retail pharmacy store job.^{1 2}

Because I grow up in Houston, you best believe I had tons of options when it came to fried chicken.

There were the national chains you might think of (Kentucky Fried, Popeye’s), but there were also a number of local or regional shops (e.g. Hartz, Church’s). One of the regional bird fryers was Grandy’s. Their logo/icon features a “Meemaw” type little, old lady in granny specs in a way reminiscent of Minnie Pearl. I suppose the image was meant to invoke your country grandmother and good, down-home cooking.

In those days, I wasn’t really into fried chicken…and if ever I were to eat it, you could rest assured that I’d be going for something boring like a drumstick or a breast.

This stands in stark contrast to my father. He’s the kind of guy I’d find, in the middle of the night, standing illuminated by refrigerator light eating fish-in-oil from a tin while accenting each swimmer with dabs of Dijon mustard. His palette was always adventurous. His love of adventurous food led him to Grandy’s, for they served (blanch) fried chicken gizzards.

So on a given summer night in the early 90’s, he and I had been at a hardware

store nearby and we stopped in to bring dinner home to the family. As per usual, news/sports radio on the AM band was playing as we traversed the fallow fields of parking lot between hardware megastore and chicken shack. Throughout my youth, my dad rarely played music in the car outside of weekends (then it was the country countdown on KIKK). His auditory accompaniments were usually business strategy books on tape (forerunner to the podcast) or the latest news, weather, and market news on KPRC AM radio. Thanks to KPRC, I knew the format of the market update: winners, losers, Dow advancing, Dow in retreat, market-impacting news. Tagline. Stinger. Out.

We walked into the Grandy’s with the muted sound of AM radio echoing in our skulls. As we walked in, we were greeted by their chicken slingingers argot:

I’ve got two legs up and 8 biscuits on tray. Tea on tray and order up.

Apropos of nothing else my dad quipped, in the plunging stentorian tones of news radio, something like:

Legs are up and breasts are down with gizzards trading even in the late-afternoon session.

I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. I still do.

I’m not sure whether this is one of those “had to be there jokes” or not, but it still makes me laugh.

Like most American children, I was taught cursive writing around 4^th grade. I was then obligated to write in it, and my poor teachers were forced to read it, through the 8^th grade. As students entered high school, we were deemed intelligent enough to decide which handwriting scheme we preferred. All of that, of course, was becoming moot by the rising prevalence of electrical typewriters and computers. But when my school-supply-kit-issued Bic ball-point pen reached paper, I opted for print letter-forms.

But somewhere in my 20’s, I rediscovered cursive and now primarily write in it with a fountain pen (when I’m not at a keyboard). And when I saw linguist John McWhorter take cursive to task in a recent Times article, I saw both a pragmatic (wrist pain and hand cramp) and an aesthetic reason that it should remain in curricula.

Over the years, I’ve played lots of video games and loved a great many of them: from side-scroller bliss with the Mario series to adult meditations on humanity (The Last of Us), Nietzschean philosophy (Dark Souls), and surviving grief (Silent Hill 2). While some of these were moving if not profound, the game that changed my life the most was “LOGIC LEVELS.”

This game stands out because it ultimately presaged my interest in logic and gates and also making hands-on learning fun. This seed would lead to the dial-up internet on a SCO V Unix in a shell; it would lead to the BBS era; it would lead to the philosophy degree and the IS degree and all those elective hours chocked full of foreign languages … just pretty much everything that I like. In some ways, there was a seed of me-ness on that Commodore 64 5¼ inch diskette.

As for the game play, perhaps showing is better than telling:

But what’s been so vexing about this game is that for the last several decades, I couldn’t remember its name and had the frustrating task of describing something that meant a lot to me, but which the world, largely, seemed to have forgotten.

My favorite podcast, “60 Songs that Explain the ’90s,” hosted by Rob Harvilla recently returned. On the show, Rob, a music critic and editor, discusses the significance, great moments, powerful lyrics, and emotional impact of various songs. He truly is a gifted writer about the experience of loving music and loving the making of music. The opening track for his new series covering the 2000’s is The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.“¹

His coverage made me think to the first time I had heard the song in my living room on Rainbow Drive in Mountain View on late-night MTV² ; I thought about the song’s album, Hot Fuss, playing on my iPod Shuffle at the Gold’s Gym off of 101; and then I realized that the album is now twenty years old. So this is a post about The Killers, the Death of Rock ’n Roll, the 2000’s, and Hot Fuss.