Placemats of the Future  
   
 
Friday, June 28, 2002

Decade of Greed:

This week Slate reviewed an 80s pop collection called (gulp) Like, Omigod: The '80s Pop Culture Box, a seven CD box set, the compilation to end all compilations. Now, I'm not going to defend 80s pop; I'm not even on such great terms with that mawkish self-aggrandizing inspid Leviathan called rock music. But I did live through the era and listened many a time to the music being barbecued by Slate and thought I'd remind the intrepid duo that the decades prior to the Reagan Era hardly produced an embarrassment of pop music masterwork.

Consider, if you will, the 1970s, the throwback decade our culture seems to have rutted in again:

  • Frampton Comes Alive. (Shudder.)
  • Anything and everything produced by KISS.
  • Smoke on the Water: Hard rock hook-oriented pop.
  • "Is that Free Bird? Well turn it up!"
  • Foghat.
  • Takin' Care of Business. The Me Decade's answer to Disney's It's a Small World. You hear it once, you hear it all day damn long.
  • Disco. Disco. Disco.

I could go on. And the ex-hippies out there better wipe that smirk off their painted faces; the 60s don't fare much better.

"What about the Beatles? Led Zeppelin? The Who?" Blah, blah, blah. Unlike the Slatesters, you've missed the point: the 80s produced some above-average pop/rock, and even some real gems, and if you listen hard enough, some genius-level activity which stands up favorably to the grandmasters of yore. But to skewer a decade of music just because it doesn't meet a prior decade's criteria -- pretty tired critera, in my view -- well, maybe it's not the 80s problem, but yours.


Thursday, June 27, 2002

Ninety-nine red fluff goons:

Inspiration:

99 senators on the wall,
99 senators paid off,
Take a vote, tell all the folks,
Now Congress supports "under god."

(Visual option: Senator on steps of Capitol Hill wearing used-car dealer suit waving American flag and holding a copy of the King James Bible.)


Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Sample platter:

When people recall what life was like when things were inconvenient, slow, and all-around boring, they often think of the microwave. "How'd we live without a microwave?" they say. Maybe not in the first-person plural, but some variation thereof.

Microwaves, of course, make food hot, or at least unfrozen, and in this country, our access to cheap quick meals is perhaps the only sanctified luxury we commonly agree on. We have others, such as cheap electricity, and infinite garbage production, and The Sopranos. But one modern luxury goes back to the last century, and that's our right to the telephone. Bell done well.

The next time you (or we, or I, or they) marvel over the microwave and how it's made our lives so-o-o much easier, stop. Instead, the touch-tone phone. Remember rotary dialing? Remember pulling the rotor around and then waiting a micro-eternity for it circle back so you could dial the next number? Trying as a kid to twist it past the one, to see if you could dial negative numbers? (Maybe that was just me.) The sound it made as you waited, and waited, and waited to finish dialing: click-click-click-click-click. (That's when you dialed a '5' for all you youngin's out there.)

Think of this world: No wireless phones. No cell phones. No redial. No answering machines. No call forwarding. No ... convenience. It's practically Orwellian.

Lately I've been having dreams about them. It's like a David Lynch movie. I dial a rotary phone and a dog on an Arctic ice cap rings. A woman in a cowboy hat picks up the leash and says she's going to have to call me back. Only she says it backwards-forwards, like that freaky dwarf in Twin Peaks. And then I set down the phone and dial. And dial. And dial. The click-click-click turns into my heartbeat. I reach into a Thanksgiving turkey sitting on a placemat in front of me and find red rubber ball. My name is written across it in gold ink. I know I'm dead but when I wake up I'm not.

Maybe you didn't need to hear all that.




Copyright (c) 2002, 2003 Jim Nelson.