Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Policy Of Alternative Facts

I don't want to sound like I'm obsessed with the musical tastes of conservatives.  Yes, I know, I've only written a couple of articles about it, but that seems like a lot. But we just keep getting stories about right-wingers and their love of the same bands I love.  The latest is Richard Spencer coming out as a fan of Depeche Mode, and declaring them "the official band of the Alt-Right."

Once again, I don't really understand how that happens.  A lot of their early music seems to be directly out of the Communist Manifesto. And one of their most popular songs, "People Are People," is as clear an anti-bigotry song as there is.

I think it's pretty weird for a person to listen to music with a message so different from their own beliefs. And most people seem to see it that way.  A few years ago there was a young pundit in Britain who became a laughingstock for suggesting that Morrissey was responsible for the country's turn to the right under David Cameron.

Okay, you may have been so distracted by the thought of someone thinking that left-of-Marx Morrissey could be a conservative icon, that you may have missed the irony that we were talking about David Cameron being shockingly right-wing.  Ah, simpler times.

Anyway, you can kind of see where she was coming from: Cameron - and many others in his government - would have come of age in the eighties, at the height of Morrissey's career. (Cameron has claimed to actually be a fan.) And consider that Morrissey is the sort of cult-level celebrity that means a lot to some but will be largely absent from the mainstream pop-cultural record.  Young people are forgiven for not knowing who he is, or why my generation cares about him. Just imagine hipster Millennials trying to explain to their kids who Jack White was. So when Morrissey's autobiography came out a few years ago, and people in Cameron's generation couldn't stop talking about this guy the young journalist had never heard of, she put two and two together and got the idea that he was the genesis for modern conservatism.

I still don't understand this concept. I mean, it's not like being a Sir-Mix-a-Lot fan who's attracted to svelte women. In that case you could say you disagree, but can respect his opinion, as well as his self-professed honesty about it. But with these alt-right alt-rock fans, they've dedicated their lives to fighting against the ideas in their favourite music, and their musical idols would despise their values.

Of course, it cuts both ways. If you're a left-leaning person, you probably don't have a problem with musicians unless you're into country. But there may be other areas of your life. Take sports, for instance. Massachusetts may be one of the most liberal parts of the US, yet in the Superbowl, they had to cheer for a coach and quarterback that supported Donald Trump, at least in as much as they are aware of a world beyond football.

And I'm feeling it too. Normally this weekend I'd be looking forward to the Daytona 500. But I've been put off by NASCAR and its overt support for Trump. Yes, despite this being the first time in a generation that a Canadian will be in the race. And even though that Canadian, DJ Kennington is a local boy from St. Thomas, who cut his teeth at my beloved Delaware Speedway in London. But I can't bring myself to watch the race, not even out of morbid curiosity of how many Confederate Flags will be in the audience, and how the TV coverage will avoid showing them. Unlike Spencer, I can't ignore the fact that someone is working against what I believe in.

Behind Plastic Eye-Holes

For this Halloween,  I thought I'd complain about the costumes available when I was a kid. Pre-made Halloween costumes from the seventies and eighties were crap.  For a start,  they were just a cheap plastic mask, and a sort of tunic body covering that was obviously just a colourful garbage bag.

But the thing that bugged me most about these things is their complete failure at being costumes.  There'd be, say, a Bugs Bunny costume with a Bugs Bunny mask, but then the plastic garment would have a picture of Bugs Bunny on it, possibly with the words,  "Bugs Bunny" on it.  For one thing, it's a bad costume if you have to tell everyone what you are. But more to the point,  Bugs Bunny doesn't have a picture of himself on his chest. So you aren't dressing up as Bugs Bunny so much as you're dressing up as an obsessed fan of Bugs Bunny, which is no fun.

Even to my developing mind which was still figuring the way the universe works,  I could tell something was wrong with this arrangement.  I couldn't really articulate it,  because it's kind of an existential mobius strip: things don't usually have pictures of themselves on themselves.  So I just had to accept this and not criticize my classmates when they dressed up as Darth Vaders with pictures of Darth Vaders on their chests.

Since then,  I've found that others had the same problem with these costumes.  Apparently they were like Scrappy-Doo: we all hated it,  but didn't say anything at the time.  Anyway,  I bring this up because I'm amazed at how far costumes have come.  Even pretty cheap Value Village costumes are much better than those old plastic monstrosities,  and probably cost the same,  adjusted for inflation. And they at least take a stab at looking like things,  not referring to them.  So that's something kids today can take pleasure in: better Halloween costumes,  and better cartoons.

From The Past Until Completion

You may have seen this video of a group called "Orkestra Obsolete" using old instruments to play New Order's 1983 synthpop classic, "Blue Monday":

(And here's the original for comparison.)

It's all using instruments from the 1930's.  It may seem like cheating to use actual electronics, but that granddaddy of electronic instruments, the Theremin, dates back all the way to 1920.  I can't seem to find much information on this "Orkestra Obsolete," so I don't know if they're going to do more of these anachronistic covers.  I hope so; I want them to try Steampunk where they actually use steam to perform punk.

So if you could have made a pretty good approximation of 1980's electronic pop fifty years earlier, I wonder what the people of the 1930's would have thought of it. Because it sounds so unlike any music of the time, I'm guessing they wouldn't have liked it. And that brings up a point I've heard people make before: like it or not, technology shapes our musical styles.  For instance, bass sounds have become more popular along with the abilities of our speakers.

So that makes me wonder: it was possible for people in the past to create modern music with what they had available, it just wasn't easy.  So just how many different styles of music might be possible, but difficult, today?

Who Ought To Be In Pictures

What's the deal with these posters featuring Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Humphrey Bogart?  A local diner has several, as they seem to see them as the way to get their 50's vibe on. (That previous sentence involved a collision of the slang from at least three decades, I apologise for it.) I thought maybe it was one artist with a weird fixation, but I've found at least two artists making them.

You can get them playing poker, singing karaoke, even working on an anachronistic stock car. Which is at least less morbid than Dean with the car he died in.  And perhaps most famously, you get get them replacing the original subjects of Edward Hopper's classic Nighthawks.

But I have to wonder, why them?  If you want to evoke the fifties, there are plenty of other choices. Even if you specifically wanted to show bitter-sweet heroes embodying America's lost innocence, you could have used, say, Buddy Holly.  The page I linked to at the start of this post also included a number of suggestions.  I'm guessing that the reason is that descendants of celebrities may have a problem with how they are depicted, and perhaps these four have less legal problems.

I also wonder what people other decades might turn into poster stars.  I need to know for when I go into business with my retro 80's fast food joint.  Michael Jackson is an obvious choice.  Madonna and Prince have probably stayed around too long to represent the era. Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon would work as an 80's symbol, but is probably not well-known enough as an individual. Who else? How about:

• Michael J. Fox
• Boy George
• Corey Haim
• Molly Ringwald
• Cindy Lauper
• Mr. T
• Brooke Shields
• Pee Wee Herman
• Max Headroom

Those are my suggestions. Painters, get to it; I'll be by in a few years to pick up my painting of four of the above playing Trivial Pursuit.

Hollow Movies

This year there's going to be a live-action movie based on the 1980's cartoon, Jem and the Holograms. A trailer has been released, and fans are up in arms.

I didn't really understand the controversy, since the show was after my time. It was my experience growing up that kids watch cartons, but then around the time they get to the teens, they figure they've outgrown them. But by their late teens, they often come back: they've realized that the rest of television isn't that great, and they can use irony as an excuse for why they're watching cartoons even as they enter adulthood. Or maybe they just get high.

So I looked up the show on Wikipedia to try to understand it, and sure enough, it was on during my early teens. As the title suggests, it's about a rock group. But this being an 80's carton, it can't simply be about a rock group: the singer leads a double life using a holographic appearance generated by an advanced computer and projected through her magic earrings. Of course.

But judging by the trailer, the movie chucks all this, and has a straightforward story of teen girls hitting it big in the music biz after a YouTube clip goes viral. It's got themes of being true to yourself and your friends, and looks like an episode of Behind the Music as produced by the Disney Channel. So I can understand why fans of the original show are angry.

The Wikipedia article notes that the trailer for the movie has alienated the movie's target audience. Not so fast, anonymous Wikipedia editor: it's pretty clear the movie is being aimed at teenage girls, not the thirty-somethings who watched the original show. Of course that's more frustrating, since it means the studio might just get away with this cynical rebooting.

But it does bring up a question I've wondered about with this and many other movie remakes: why bother?  I know, most of them make sense. If the last Batman movie made money, a risk-averse studio will want to make a sequel or reboot. More distant tie-ins like Battleship are less obvious, but they are trying to cope with our fragmented and international media in which it's difficult to promote a movie, so you base it on a game that everyone alive has played.

But Jem and the Holograms was only on for a few years, and unlike contemporaries like Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it didn't really have a lasting media legacy that younger people might recognize. So why would you buy the movie rights to a show young people won't recognize, so you can make a movie for young people? It would make sense if you were buying it for a good premise that you think would appeal to new generations as it did with previous ones. But that's not the case here: they ignored the premise, and used only the name. If your audience doesn't know the brand, why not base it on an all-new concept that you don't have to pay someone to use.

Worse, the people who will recognize the source might be the parents of the target audience. Good luck getting teens to see a movie that gives their patents fond memories.

Bogus Technology, Dude

A lot of people have been talking about this article in the New York Times by then-technology writer, Erik Sandberg-Diment. That's in spite of the fact it's from 1985. What's notable is that it is about laptops, or at least the overgrown calculators that passed for laptops in the eighties.  The article has been widely ridiculed for getting it about as wrong as possible.

As an aside, I wonder why people are only now seeing it. Presumably it's been sitting there on the NYT web site for years, just waiting for someone to find it. Maybe there's someone with a hobby of reading the Times thirty years later for fun.

The website Boing Boing made the point that the lesson of this article is less about obtuse journalism, and more about how companies try to push a technology before it's ready for the public. I think they've got a point. Consider what a "laptop" was in 1985: it wasn't just a portable desktop. These machines were underpowered even by the standards of the time. They made do with tiny, monochrome screens that only had room for a half-dozen lines.  In retrospect, the only reason those machines look useful is that we look at them knowing what they would evolve into.  Really, they were trying to produce future technology with what was available at the time: in other words, they were low-level steampunk.

It also reminds us that predictions have to be taken with a little context. One thing that stood out to me in the article was that he kept focusing on those laptops as failing due to their software. That's quite nonsensical today: we're used to laptops having the same software available as a desktop. But in those days, they were limited to custom-made, perhaps built-in, software, made to deal with the less-powerful processors and limited screens. If he could see what we consider a laptop today, he might change his tune. I'm guessing anyway; I couldn't find a comment from Sandberg-Diment himself.  As far as I can tell, he left technology journalism to go back to his first love, painting. 

Anyway, the point is, our world is well beyond the scope of a 1985 newspaper article.  Back in the twentieth century people thought of "the future" as starting in 2000, so we're not just living in his future, we're living beyond it. Who knows what people in the eighties would have imagined 2015 to look like. Oh, wait, we don't have to wonder, they made a whole movie about it.

I bring this up as someone who has made negative predictions about a few technologies myself. I've been bearish on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and drones. So I feel I should emphasize that I'm not saying these things will never happen, just that they'll take longer than people - particularly the media - think they'll take. I have no doubt that they're all possible, and barring disaster they'll all happen eventually.

But another point on considering misguided predictions from the past, is that it's never clear when to finally pass judgement. A second part of the article that stood out to me was his ridiculing the idea of lugging a laptop home from work, when you could just carry a few floppy disks. And of course, today we could replace those floppies with a thumb drive that's more portable and durable. So that's a good question, why do we lug our laptops/tablets/phones around?

The simple answer is that in a world where computers do so many things, the data and applications specific to us are more than we can fit on a thumb drive. But I wonder how long the current situation will last. More and more devices are connected, and more of our data is on the cloud. All we need are some breakthroughs in security, encryption and identification, and we would have a world where people feel comfortable accessing their personal data from whatever devices are available, not necessarily their own personal devices. To put it another way, we expect artificial lighting to be available wherever we go, but that doesn't mean we carry flashlights everywhere. It could be that people in the future will look back at laptops as a strange aberration in the history of computers, and see this New York Times article as very prescient.

Back To The Future

In the past I've speculated that the internet is so big that it has moved on from everything being on the internet somewhere, to putting every combination of things on the net, starting with geeky things. That had been further confirmed today: superheroes combined with the stars of British post-punk? check. 

(That was pretty funny, but they should have included "The Uncanny XTC-Men.")

I made the mistake of glancing at the comments, the first of which speculated that the 80's musicians featured would be before-the-time of most of the site's readers. Subsequent comments didn't come right out and say, "shut up you humourless troll," but their praise of the content seemed to imply it.

That stuck in my mind because later in the day I heard the song "Lifted Up" by Passion Pit on the radio, which has the corus, “1985 was a good year.” That’s odd, since their singer-songwriter Michael Angelakos was born in 1987.  So what's with young people hanging out with their parents' decade?

I noticed a long time ago that there's a kind of constantly moving window of nostalgia. When I first became conscious of popular culture in the 1980's, nostalgia pretty much meant the birth of rock and roll through to the end of the 60's. As time went on, the seventies were added, and then the fifties were quietly dropped. That always seemed sad; it's bad enough when your favourite music slips out of style, but it has to be much worse to know it will never be back.  So I've been kind of dreading the day when I will take my place along side the Chuck Berry fans on the Island of Unwanted Culture.

With all that in mind I have to ask: is out just me, or are the eighties hanging around longer than expected? Although the generational troll in the comments I mentioned earlier has a point about today's young people not being familiar with eighties musicians, the counter-argument is that demographics be damned, people just keep revisiting that decade.  I mean, two different Ghostbusters reboots?

You wouldn't think the eighties would be the decade that keeps going and going.  The people who have the closest connection to it are Generation X, who are fewer in number.  Maybe it's just a fun decade; you can image how much trouble the Internet is going to have doing a mash-up of Lord of the Rings characters and Grunge stars.  Maybe it's how easy it is to consume media today.  For instance, I as a child didn't really have a chance to view movies from thirty-years earlier even if I had the inclination to do so.  But the various incarnations of home video has ensured that - starting in the eighties - people can revisit past movies.  Whatever the reason, I won't be questioning the decade's longevity, since it keeps me from feeling too old.

Gag Me With A Greasy Spoon

This weekend I went to Wimpy's diner. Like many modern diners, it goes for a fifties aesthetic. And, like many modern diners, it isn't always accurate in its depiction. I don't mind if the food is not necessarily straight from the decade (I ordered a wrap) but the decor could be better. For instance, there are a bunch of records tacked to the wall. I tried to check what the records were, but the only label I could read while seated turned out to be Howard Jones. I could have given them a pass on a fifties-flavoured eighties artist like Huey Lewis, but not a only-in-the-eighties synth-abuser. It didn't help that the muzak played the Pet Shop Boys shortly after.

That brings up something I'd like to see: an eighties-oriented eatery. But an eighties diner wouldn't make much sense: diners use fifties style because they're a part of that decade's culture. So what form would an eighties eatery take? I'm envisioning a fast food place. Yes, I know, fast food is older that that, but it seemed to come of age in the eighties. We had "where's the beef?", non-ironic use of The Burger King, and the more-than-occasional Grimace sighting.

I see a fast food place that is unapologetic - no modernist architecture and urban-cafe interior styling - I want all rounded-plastic furniture. All the food comes in Styrofoam containers.  You can't order drinks: you take the Pepsi Challenge and you're stuck with whatever wins.  Fifties-style diners usually have the "mens" and "womens" on the washroom doors signified by pictures of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.  Instead, we'll have Michael Jackson and Madonna.

I'm hoping some of this will actually happen. As we approach 2015, the year they went to in Back To The Future II, someone will make a real Café 80's.

Goldberg Variations

You may have seen ads for this new show, The Goldbergs, which is set during the 1980's.  I can just see the meeting where they came up with that premise:

"Nice idea, but I'm not sure the entire decade of the 1980's offers us enough clichés to sustain an entire sitcom."
"We could make them Jewish?"
"That should do it."

But the reason I'm sceptical is that the show violates the Two Decade Rule of Televised Nostalgia:

Show	Set in	Started in
That 70's Show	90's	70's
The Wonder Years	60's	80's
Happy Days	50's	70's
Hogan's Heroes	40's	60's

Okay, Hogan's Heroes is pushing it, but my point is that we should have moved on to 90's nostalgia by now.  There was also a That 80's Show, which debuted in the 2000's, thus maintaining the pattern.  But it was here and gone faster than KITT solving a Rubik's Cube so you may not remember it.  I guess that's why the networks figure they can take a pastel-emblazoned mulligan.

The 80's were a funny decade, so you should be able to make a show about it.  Say, thirty-something boomer former hippies running a BMW dealership.  And their kid interns for Atari.  And a new wave band lives next door.

On second thought, just show Family Ties reruns.