Tag: nostalgia (Page 4 of 11)

1984 Again

June 24, 2014 / DB

I’ve stated my case, many times, for 1984 being one of the best pop culture years ever. Over the weekend, there was another effort at laying down ’84’s case. I’m sure this crossed your Twitter/Facebook/Blogosphere streams, but I couldn’t let it go without sharing again.

Thirty years ago last weekend, here’s what you could see at a movie theater:
* Ghostbusters
* Gremlins
* Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
* The Karate Kid
* Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
* Top Secret!
* The Natural
* Police Academy

Holy shit!

As Jason Kottke pointed out, Sixteen Candles and Footloose closed the weekend before.

As for music, here’s the Top 10 from that week:
* “The Reflex” – Duran Duran
* “Time After Time” – Cyndi Lauper
* “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” – Deniece Williams
* “Dancing In The Dark” – Bruce Springsteen
* “Self Control” – Laura Branigan
* “The Heart Of Rock & Roll” – Huey Lewis and The News
* “Jump” – The Pointer Sisters
* “When Doves Cry” – Prince and The Revolution
* “Eyes Without A Face” – Billy Idol
* “Borderline” – Madonna

Pop, rock, dance, and some soul. If you think that list sent me over to the Billboard site to dig deeper into that week’s Hot 100, you would be correct. I just can not resist a 1980s music rabbit hole.

Great movies, great music, and the Los Angeles Olympics were a month away. Summer 1984 was crazily awesome.

A Real American Hero

May 28, 2014 / DB

As a young lad, my summers were split into two, roughly even, segments. The first half consisted of baseball and day camp at the YMCA. Once baseball season ended, usually in mid-July, my mom would ship me off to spend a month or so with my grandparents in central Kansas.

Her parents were farmers. They could pick up three TV stations (on a good day). Their home was small and few items from my uncles’ childhoods remained. I’d spend my time at their house either throwing a baseball against the side of the barn, going to the pool in the nearest town with my cousins, or using things from the suitcase full of books, toys, games, and baseball cards I brought along to pass the days.

My dad’s parents, though, lived up the road a bit in a small city. They had cable TV.¹ There was a small zoo that I later realized was pretty sad and likely cruel to the animals. Evenings would be spent sitting on the front porch listening to the Royals game with my grandfather. But, most importantly, their basement was filled with toys left by my youngest uncle, who is just 11 years older than me. On my first day at their house, after spending the obligatory time catching up and settling into my room, I would rush downstairs and start dragging out things to play with for the next week. Prominent in that pile was my uncle’s old G.I. Joe collection.

I loved those old Joes. I lamented that the line disappeared in the late 1970s, just as I was getting old enough to really be into them. When Hasbro resurrected the line as Star Wars-sized figures a few years later, I’ll admit I spent probably a year or two longer than I should have playing with them. I had to make up for lost time, I guess.

Don Levine, the man who created the G.I. Joe, died last week.

Alex Pappademas wrote this terrific tribute to Levine and overview of the history of G.I. Joe for Grantland.

“Hasbro was the laughingstock of the toy fair in 1964 because no one assumed G.I. Joe would sell,” the company’s longtime marketing director Wayne Charness told the Chicago Tribune in the late ’80s, when sales of G.I. Joe figures and ancillary products had topped $2 billion. “The buyers thought we had a terrible idea, and they only bought a small amount, but that first year we had a monster hit. We laughed all the way into 1989, and we’re still laughing.”

In Memoriam: Pouring Out Some Heavy Water for Don Levine, the Father of G.I. Joe

Yo Joe!

I watched For Your Eyes Only at least 50 times at their house in 1982. ↩

A Night About Nothing

April 17, 2014 / DB

This is so great in so many ways.

The Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team will be hosting a Seinfeld night on July 5, the 25th anniversary of the “Seinfeld Chronicles,” the original name for “Seinfeld.” They’ve put some thought into this. Activities will include:

MCU Park will known as Vandelay Industries Park for one night only.
Mailmen in uniform get to throw out a ceremonial first pitch (“Hello Newman!”)
Anyone who has a business card indicating that they are in fact a “Latex Salesman” will also receive a free ticket to the game. If we call the number and it’s some apartment on the Upper East Side, you won’t qualify for the freebie.
Fans can visit the information table for an “airing of grievances.”
Closest to the pin / whale’s blow hole competition (“Is that a Titleist?”)
The foul poles will be known as Festivus Poles.
“Low-Talking” PA Announcer.
Elaine Dancing Contest
Players in puffy shirts for batting practice.

That is some good stuff. I can’t see anyone doing something like this for a current show 25 years from now.

Zander

April 14, 2014 / DB

The name Zander Hollander may not mean much to the majority of my readers. But for some of us, mostly men who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s loving sports, he played a huge role in our formative years as sports fans.

Mr. Hollander, who was the creative force behind the Complete Handbook series, died last week at the age of 91.

One of the few splurge purchases I was allowed to make when I was young, and my parents were short on cash, was the occasional book from the Scholastic book flyers that came home from school. Whenever one of Hollander’s new guides to the NFL, NBA, or MLB appeared, I pounced on it. Once it arrived, I quickly turned to the section on my favorite team and devoured all the profiles and stats. Then I flipped around and read the details on my favorite players who weren’t on my team of choice. Then I’d read through the reviews of the previous season and previews of the coming season. Eventually, I made it through the whole thing, although never from front-to-back.

As this terrific profile from last summer states, Hollander’s books were the best source for information-hungry sports fans in the pre-Internet era. They were jam-packed with statistics, schedules, and essays to keep you busy for months, but small enough to throw into your book bag or take along wherever you went.

I think I’ll go dig through the boxes in the attic and see if, by chance, any of my old Complete Handbooks have survived 30-plus years of moves and purges.

For Sports Fans, Before the Internet, There Were the Complete Handbooks

The Walkman

April 11, 2014 / DB

Another quick one before the weekend begins.

A couple sites have linked to this modern, design-based review of the Sony Walkman. It focuses on form rather than function, but is still interesting to read/look at.

Like the iPod, the Walkman isn’t truly the first of its kind. There was a cassette player before it called the Stereobelt. It was big, ugly, expensive and only lived on as a patent. What the Walkman did was make the idea of a portable cassette player into a marketable, attractive consumer product. That’s the genius of Sony.

Sony Walkman TPS-L2

It’s fun to look back and see how dramatically personal music consumption has changed within our generation’s lives. Through most of our first decade, the only way to listen to music, on your own, around town, was to carry a small transistor radio and listen via a single ear bud. No stereo sound sound for you! And you were limited to whatever stations were within reach of your radio’s antenna.

Then the Walkman came along and offered you freedom. You could throw a cassette in and listen to the songs of your choosing, skipping the ones you didn’t like or listening to your favorites over-and-over. Throw another cassette in your pocket, or a handful into your briefcase/purse/backpack, and you were set for the day.

During the Walkman era, any traveling I did meant I had my knockoff Walkman and headphones in my bag, and a small carrier that held 12 cassettes in their cases. That made those long car trips across Kansas and Missouri, or the occasional flight to California and back, more tolerable.

And then the iPod changed things exponentially. Today you can cart along pretty much every song you own, each instantly accessible, and carry the device into your front pocket. An iPod Nano will even tuck into the coin pocket in your jeans. Or you can stream every song you could ever want to hear, on demand, straight to your phone.

Pretty amazing. And makes you wonder what could possibly be the next step.

Ends In A Zero

January 30, 2014 / DB

This all probably means nothing, and I can’t find a clever way to tie them all together, but there are four rather interesting anniversaries/birthdays that each end in zero, in close proximity to each other.

In reverse order, youngest to oldest…

Hoop Dreams just turned 20. I remember watching it in a little arty theater in Westport, in Kansas City, where you sat on folding chairs and the film was projected on a small screen. Like a lot of people my age, I was sucked into the story because it was about college basketball and there were appearances by many players and coaches I followed closely. But it was also an utterly engrossing story. It’s one of those insider looks at the realities of high school sports, and college recruiting, that makes you feel a little dirty to follow sports so closely. I need to carve out some time to watch it again.

Next, the Macintosh turned 30 this week. Being an astute observer of the Apple-centric side of the Internet, I’ve read a bunch of terrific pieces about the anniversary. I enjoyed most the ones by people who actually used the first Mac. It seems a little silly now, but that really was a revolutionary machine and the first real step to bringing computers to the masses. The Mac, obviously, became a big part of my life. But not for another 20 years after its introduction. Hey, how about that? My 10-year anniversary as a Mac user is coming up later this year! I guess I’ll have to write something about that when July rolls around.

Next, Dungeons & Dragons turned 40 last weekend. There was an 18-24 month chunk of my life in middle school when I was really into D&D. Or, as I’ve said many times, I was always into the idea of D&D more than the actual execution of it. I enjoyed rolling up new characters, reading about adventures, and planning to play the game more than actually trying to get some people together and squeeze a game in during homeroom or at a Friday-night sleepover. When I waste hours playing a game like Kingdom Rush today, it all goes back to that early 80s fascination with D&D.

Finally, Christie Brinkley turns 60 on Sunday. Holy shit! I was a few years too young for Farrah Fawcet, although I certainly watched Charlie’s Angels and admired the legendary Farrah poster that a few older kids in my neighborhood had. But for the guys in my slice of our generation, born in 1969-74 let’s say, Christie was it. She ushered in the era of the super model, and because of that likely never had the iron grip on a generation the way Farrah did in the 1970s. Kathy Ireland, Carol Alt, and Elle Macpherson all came along and grabbed the “Hottest SI Cover Girl” title in the 80s. But I’ll never forget my first ever Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, because Christie was on the cover. And, of course, there was her appearance on National Lampoon’s Vacation, in future husband Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” video, and more recently her sublime moments as Jerry Gergich’s lovely wife Gayle on Parks and Recreation. She even plays a surprising part in the 30 For 30 episode “No Más,” about the 1980 Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran fights.

I did the math, and my first memories of my grandmothers are from when they were in their late 50s, early 60s. They looked nothing like Christie Brinkley does now. Sure, she’s had work done, but it’s high quality work augmented by a lot of effort on her part. Not that I’ve spent the morning looking at recent pictures of her or anything.

When Trent, Mikey, Rob, & Sue Were Our Heroes

January 23, 2014 / DB

Sadly, all this cold has sapped my brain of writing inspirations. So yet another link for you. This is a good one, though.

Grantland offers up the oral history of all oral histories: an insiders’ tale of the making of the movie Swingers. It’s great, although not nearly long enough for extreme devotees of the flick. Still, plenty of great tidbits, including this story about the inspiration for the closing scene of the movie.

Vaughn: I went back to Chicago to see my parents before I started filming Swingers and I was at the airport, waiting to fly back to Los Angeles, sitting down, waiting. And there was a gentleman in line to get his boarding pass. But it appeared to me that he kept waving at me and smiling at me and giggling and it made me uncomfortable. At first I thought, How do I know this guy? But he’s doing it in a very kind of babyish way, it feels a little weird. And he just was very confident the way that he did it. And he kept moving through the line very slowly, and so I tried to look at him like You’re crazy, or laugh, like Ohhhhh. But nothing like this seemed to deter him from wanting to engage me in this kind of a flirtatious, little-kid way. So when he finally got his ticket, he began to walk toward me. And I’m like, Oh jeez, this guy is really coming over here. And then he stopped and he picked up a baby that was sitting in a chair that I couldn’t see from my vantage point.

Love it!

As I told some folks today, I’ve probably watched Swingers more than any non-holiday movie in my life. Fletch might be close, but Swingers was the go-to movie when we stumbled home after last call in the late-90s and early-00s. It was the get in the mood movie before going out. And I often just put it on as I did other things around my apartment, almost like background music. It’s been years since I’ve watched it, though. That may need to change this week.

So Money

Not So New Wave

December 4, 2013 / DB

There’s no real way to tease this, other than to suggest you go look at it.

New Wave Artists Aging Gracefully

Well, not all of them are aging gracefully. Be on the lookout for: Boy George (!), Tears For Fears (???), and Simon LeBon (WTF). I think it’s safe to say that Pete Burns has had the most profound change in appearance. And, if you pay attention to the musical heroes of our youth, it will be no surprise that David Bowie and Susanna Hoffs have aged the best.

Farewell Winamp

November 21, 2013 / DB

Time, and technology, march forward. The first widely popular desktop application that played MP3 files, Winamp, is being shut down in December.

AOL Shuts Down Winamp For Good

I first downloaded Winamp in December 1997. Pearl Jam had a new single, “Given To Fly,” that was getting airplay in advance of its official release. I kept reading on Pearl Jam discussion lists how you could listen to “radio rips” of the song if you had the right software¹. I did some searching, found and installed Winamp, downloaded some incredibly compressed rips, and my digital music adventure was off and running.

I kept Winamp around for several years. In the early days, I had a collection of 30 or so Pearl Jam covers recorded at concerts. Eventually, once I discovered Napster and other downloading sites and began ripping my CDs to my hard drive, my library grew. But I believe I stuck with Winamp until our first Mac arrived in July 2004. A lot of good musical memories are wrapped up in that app.

I don’t recall it fondly because it was some great piece of software. It was pretty utilitarian, taking sound files and playing them. I was never into skinning my player the way some fans were. But it served a great purpose as I moved away from CDs and radio as my primary tools of music discovery and shifted to download sites, streaming radio, and eventually music blogs and the iTunes and Amazon music stores.

Farewell, Winamp.

I didn’t really know what a radio rip was, either. Man, were they awful back then, too. I remember the first I downloaded sounded like it was being played on a tiny speaker, shot through a cardboard tube, into a large, tiled room. In other words, it kind of sucked. ↩

For The Love Of Baseball And Radio

November 4, 2013 / DB

OK, cramming three things together that aren’t each related to the others, but I can link them enough to justify the single post. And, I know, all of these would have been much more timely a week ago. You were busy, too. Let’s get caught up together.

First, radio. Last week was the 75th anniversary of the War of the Worlds broadcast. I’ve always been fascinated by it for a variety of reasons. And I had heard many times before that the “panic” wasn’t nearly as widespread as legend insisted.

But this piece does the math, checks the historical record, and then delves into why there was a “panic” in the first place. The answer is awfully interesting.

How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Did Not Touch Off a Nationwide Hysteria. Few Americans Listened. Even Fewer Panicked.

Now, radio and baseball.

A wonderful look at the tremendous reach of St. Louis station KMOX, and how its power and the geography of baseball before expansion made the Cardinals, arguably, the most popular team in America, even at the height of the Yankees dynasties.

Supposedly, it still is, despite the proliferation of televisions and Internet access. But can it really still be heard clearly in other states, without the harsh accompaniment of static and interference from other stations trying to muscle in on the signal? Surely there must be some exaggeration.
To put it to the test, I set out in my rental car Sunday, the day of Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, and headed south, the radio tuned to 1120 AM, to see if I could I outdrive the signal before the end of the game.

Trying to Outrun The Cardinals’ Long Reach

And, finally, just baseball.

I love the site Flip Flop Flyball. Artist Craig Robinson uses his mastery of Photoshop and his new-found love of baseball (He’s a native of England), to create kickass, 8-bit-style graphics of famous players and historical moments. He also makes cool infographics that are not necessarily 8-bit.

He currently resides in Mexico and using the Mexican sculpture style known as Árbol de Vida (Tree of Life), he created an Árbol de Béisbol: the history of baseball in one, cool, 8-bit graphic. Here is the image, but he sure to go to the page and read up on all the elements. It’s really fantastic.

arbol

Árbol de Béisbol

And while you’re over there, look at some of his other work.