Eighties nostalgia has been a thing now for a while. The longer madras dresses stay in fashion, Jason Bateman keeps on existing in public, and people clothe their children in Bruce Springsteen t-shirts, the greater the risk you run of being outed as the ankle length denim jumper wearing homeschoolee you once were. Now you can tell me it doesn’t matter—you’re an adult now, you’ve got a good job and a membership to Film Forum. And anyhow, what kind of a person would judge another person for missing eighties pop culture references? All I can say is you’re absolutely right. Only the petty and small minded would judge you for a decade spent memorizing the books of the Bible in song form and being slain in the spirit. But sentiment works powerfully to soften minds and morals. Can you trust in the iron intellect and virtue of your friends and coworkers? Maybe. No one will judge you for remembering when the Spandau Ballet performed Les Sylphides. Or probably not to your face. People won’t like you any less and it probably won’t end your marriage if you have to ask who Phoebe Cates was, but they may subtly begin to exclude you from certain conversations on the grounds that you wouldn’t be interested and pretty soon you’ll find out about parties only the day after they took place and next thing you know you’re be getting passed over for a promotion and your kid will somehow fail the entrance interview to the only preschool capable of catapulting him into the only private school worth going to and an advanced degree in something combining philosophy with whatever makes him happy and a lot of money to support you in your old age. But if you’re okay with that, that’s cool. In fact, it’s downright worthy. You’re like Christian’s friend Faithful from Pilgrim’s Progress. Only you probably won’t be martyred for your highmindedness. But just in case it seems like you might be, here’s a bit of the information you’ll need to pretend you popped by Vanity Fair on your way to the strictly Unitarian suburb of the Celestial City you’re obviously trotting toward.
First, you need to realize that there’s no way you’re ever going to understand what everyone saw in those John Hughes movies. The guiding axiom for all that stuff is that you had to be there and you weren’t. Just change the subject or run away. There’s no point in trying to endure them as an adult. Know that attractive outsiders pouted in detention and chopped at their clothing with scissors. No one wore long denim skirts or culottes and everyone appeared to have remarkably permissive parents. I think. I haven’t actually seen any of these films from start to finish. But take heart, from here on it’s pretty easy. There was no internet to splinter youth culture into hundreds of subsets they way it is today. Pop culture was dispensed to everyone but you via one of three indistinguishable TV stations. There were more than three radio stations but you don’t have to worry about that since they all played the same thing and radio was so insidiously prevalent that in a pinch even you can quote song lyrics knowingly. You may not know who sang Take on Me, or what they meant by it, but nonetheless you probably know every word if you ever stepped outside your clock radio-less house to buy a toothbrush. And speaking of broadcast media and stepping outside the house, if you had a Grandma and spent any time with her you may have seen MacGyver. No, don’t get excited. That allusion is a doubled edged sword. Use it with caution. A year ago it would have been strictly off limits, but now it allows you to understand a variety of Saturday Night Live references, which while not exactly edgy gives you enough material to bluff a subject change or laugh heartily without looking around like an ESL speaker trying to blend in. On the other hand, people might think you once watched MacGyver. You’ll have to trust me when I say that in some instances that may be worse than having them know you spoke in tongues.
If you are a fundamentally honest person you may have some difficulty discussing eighties fashion, a subject in which you were undoubtedly conversant, chiefly because the daily ordeal of chastely suiting up as a peculiar people spawned a variety of clothing related fantasies in which you may have: modeled for Seventeen Magazine (arousing the envy of everyone you went to school with), worn legwarmers, or possessed a jean jacket covered in buttons. You were always unsure about the buttons, but you could picture the forbidden jean jacket perfectly—the luciferian tie-dyed antithesis to the shining purity of your denim skirts. You argued long and hard for it’s innocence, but ultimately lost. It did not occur to you to acquire a jean jacket and keep it in your locker. In fact, just imagining such a thing still makes your palms clammy and your heart pound. Let’s forget about fashion. Say something safe about legwarmers and leave it at that. Don’t go near Flashdance, however tempting.
Remember, any time you’re talking to someone of your own age, you can safely bring the subject round to the cold war. Succeedingsocially.com says that having something you both want to talk about is the key to conversing. Nuclear bombs are that perfect something. Drop one and you’ll hardly have to do a thing, though you’ll have plenty to say on the topic if you choose. I know for a fact, even you cloistered innocents discussed how you’d climb underneath your desks in the event of nuclear war; and, if you knew about it in advance, refuse to do your math homework and defiantly eat the secret stash of Junior Mints in your mother’s sock drawer—retribution be damned! You don’t actually have to have seen The Day After. As long as you went to school with at least one person who did, you should be fine.
Finally, keep in mind that the glimpses of pop culture you got over the years may have created a distorted vision of the decade. For instance, that vivid recollection you have of a made for TV movie where Morgan Fairchild played the lip-glossy lover of a brown haired guy who was trying to kill his wife by making her believe she was crazy—it’s possible no one on earth besides you remembers this. The point is, don’t take unnecessary chances. If all else fails you can do what you did at the time—narrow your eyes and feel superior. It won’t fix the preschool thing, but you and your kid are better off without those Vainglorians anyhow.
I haven’t been reading much lately, so my list of things to look up or puzzle over is very short. All the scrap minutes during the day when I normally read are filled up making smudgy drawings with Brushes. I really don’t think I’ve used color this much since I painted excruciatingly detailed portraits of imaginary girls and women for junior high art contests. (“Overwrought.” Second prize.) I used to use water color as if it were gouache, dripping a tiny amount of water into the paint pans and loading a dry brush with as much pigment as I could get out of a crayola watercolor case, then coloring over and over in the same place, sometimes until the paper began to buckle and pill. One summer when we lived in a dreary suburb in Galveston, I made a studio in the windowless, unairconditioned attic space above the garage. I brought all the odd crusty paints and scrubby bits of chalk I could find and put them in jars arranged by color. I would sneak up there and pull up the ladder behind me, so that no one could find me and later I could truthfully say I didn’t hear anyone calling my name. With the trap door closed it was almost impossible to breathe but I loved it. I would stay there for hours in the 110 degree heat making chalk portraits of imaginary women with enviable hair. Not many survived because I thought they were ruined once I dripped sweat on them and no good anyhow, and usually scrumpled them up in a fit… I sometimes wonder why my parents didn’t encourage my and my sisters interest in the arts more. It could be partly because our family took for granted a certain degree of visual literacy; and partly because despite a family tree bristling with painters, there was always something suspect about the lifestyle of an artist. There’s no tidy structure of authority to rein you in if you get too crazy thinking your own thoughts all by yourself day after day…
A fine article in Time Magazine on Twitter.
And Oxford University Press lexicographers monitor Twitter. I’d be curious to see how these stats compare with daily conversation. I bet soon it will be reasonable to monitor such a thing. You might have a few days of throwaway data to begin with while people get used to forgetting they’re being recorded.
And another wacky financial data visualization. I’d like to see it with updated data.
Aspartame tastes like a robot’s bottom. But that’s not the point. I was reading an article that claimed to tell The Truth About it. It was a perfect example of what’s wrong with the scientific method or the flaccid facsimile that passes for it: “These claims by unscientific hypochondriac malingerers have yet to be proven, so go on eating this thing that you’re pretty sure makes you sick because that’s just anecdotal. Anecdotal evidence is not science and not actually evidence. Until it is substantiated by four peer reviewed double blind study published in one of three journals, it’s a pack of lies. (Also shut yer cantankerous trap about methodologies, it’s the peers and the publishing that count.) Since no one has any intention of conducting said studies, all anecdotal evidence must be considered part of a vicious campaign on the part of rabid housewives and disgruntled hobos to defame the glorious and benevolent conglomerates who barely break even selling us non food items to eat. Ergo aspartame should be considered perfectly safe. Feed it to your fetus and always remember that it’s not the product on trial; it’s you, the consumer, who is guilty until proven innocent.” That quote may not be one hundred percent accurate since I transcribed it from memory; nevertheless, I think it’s time to democratize science the way communication and media have been in the last few years. It’s a creaking, squeaking hollow machine about to cave in on itself.
Also on BoingBoing a nice shout out to stabbing pens, which seem to be on everyone’s mind at the moment. Yesterday since the stupid 6 train wasn’t running, I trekked over to Grand Concourse to wait for the 4 or 5. (Good thing I left the house an hour and a half early.) Before I set foot in that station, I try to make peace with my own mortality or at least decide whether to call my bank or my spouse first when I get mugged. (V could call the bank while I call the police, I guess.) The entrance is under an overpass in the middle of nowhere, down a flight of steps with a blind corner, and since the uptown and downtown trains run in separate tunnels, no one’s got their eye on you from across the tracks. You just stand there trying to look as mean as possible. Anyhow, there I was with my back against the wall looking like a furious bitch, I hoped, when a scholarly looking guy in a light blue polo shirt and khakis came down the stairs. I was pretty relieved to have a witness for when the masked men leapt up from the tracks to either steal my wallet or ravish my person, but just when I was getting to the part about how I would gasp tell my family I love them as I lost consciousness, a real police came bounding down the stairs and pinned the startled guy in the blue shirt against the wall, in actual real life. He held the blue shirt guy with his arms behind his back as he slowly extracted an expensive looking ball point pen from the hip pocket of his khakis and punched the point in and out a few times. It looks like a knife, he explained sternly in Spanish. You can’t keep a thing like that in your pocket. Put it away. And he stepped back. The guy in the blue shirt looked startled, but surprisingly recovered enough to ask the cop for directions. Maybe the relief of being able to ask for directions in Spanish trumped the indignity of being mistaken for a thug? When he walked away I could see a sort of delayed outrage dart across his face, but he caught my eye and smiled crookedly.
On CAFO complaints:
