I kinda freaked out when i saw this tweet this morning, cause i think about this episode all the time. I even tried to do some research on it once, but then decided i’d rather not know if it was true or not. The prospect of finding out that Batman lied to me was not one i was interested in.
Weirdly, this is one of the things that stuck with me about that show too, and even then, I recall thinking “I have definitely read in dreams before, what the hell is Batman talking about.”
I won’t lie. I’m a little sad about this. This has been a regular site for me for over a decade. I remember using it to expand my musical palette beyond the painfully limited range of “Garbage and film soundtracks” back in high school.
I’ve used it considerably less lately but still check it at least once a week for new reviews, which have admittedly been fewer and farther between in recent memory.
Regardless, it’s like another part of my musical childhood has died. Harrumph.
This also makes me sad, and I had very similar high-school experiences with the site. It’s interesting how one thing on the internet can so completely shape someone’s experience of music, and then that way of experiencing things can just disappear.
The “quit smoking” video playing on the TV across from me in the hospital just showed a guy in a music store flipping through rows of CDs housed in those white plastic sleeves with the huge empty spaces at the bottom and my first thought was “How nostalgic.”
(This video was shot in 2001 but based on the clothes, hair, and home decor it might as well have been 1981. Still, a little weird to see major touchpoints from your teenage years becoming so thoroughly archaic. Also the video seems to have been shot in Maryland, so that explains the two-decades-behind thing. OH SNAP MARYLAND ZING)
“Time to check out the wildlife I’ve got captured here in my room, in my illustrated Wildlife Treasury! Hey, Rhinocerous! Says here, you sleep standing up and you only eat at night! This monkey holds up his long nose when he eats. And the duck-billed platypus has feet like a duck, but it’s furry! They’re all in my Wildlife Treasury!”
This is the part that just broke my heart into a million pieces because I remember how anxious it made me feel that the mom was going to just DESTROY this kid’s dreams:
Mom: Hey, Jungle Jimmy! More Wildlife Treasury cards just came!
Jungle Jimmy: GREAT!
Mom: You could cancel after the next shipment …
Jungle Jimmy: But we won’t … will we, Mom?
He is so forlorn at the very notion that you could cancel after the next shipment! Don’t do it, commercial mom! Let this kid cling to just one dream. Everything is totally going to suck for him eventually. So let him be 6 or 7 or even 8 and convinced he’s really on a fucking safari.
I HAD ALL THESE. They were the best. They seriously had a huge role in turning me into the nerd I am today.
So I listened to the new Tracey Thorn album today, and it is excellent, and I will probably be buying it when it comes out on Tuesday along with other excellent albums being released that day (LCD and Janelle Monáe). But listening to it got me to thinking “God, that voice,” and then naturally it got me to this song, which, God, this song. It was so ubiquitous when I was growing up that I honestly never really considered it as a piece of music and more as just an obvious piece of my young life’s background, like the palm trees next to our garage or whatever. (This sort of club music was a standard on the radio in Florida from 1994-1999; the influence of Miami and Ybor City, I guess.) But what a remarkably great song this is, and how nice it is that it was a massive hit.
It’s probably gauche to revisit old successes when an artist releases new solo work, especially when it’s the sort of seminal event that an artist would purposefully run away from being defined by (this song, and the album the original version appears on, are bizarrely unavailable on iTunes and Amazon MP3; to buy it, I had to download it on iTunes from a crappy gay-pride compilation album from 2007). But this song is beating me up in all kinds of ways and I couldn’t not shout it out. For real, though, that new Tracey Thorn album is great, and you should listen to it. Now I’m gonna go put this and “Protection” on loop for a while.
I remember coming to New York with my parents and best friend to check out NYU junior year, and going into the basement of Tower Records and falling in love with all the import singles. My friend bought this one. He had a complete run of the b-sides from Version 2.0 and I was super-jealous. But naturally he burned them all for me.
Hopefully this song will chill me out a bit on one of those days when I’m convinced I will never, ever be happy again.
If you had access to a time machine, where and when would be the first place you travel to?
There are two possible answers to this question, and they depend on your personal interpretation of how time travel works: If the past is immutable and cannot be changed, or if we can alter past events.
I tend to personally believe that the past can’t be changed, and that everything that happened already happened. If that’s the case, then I would go back in time to the Cretaceous era and check out the sweet dinosaurs, since I obviously already did so and I know I’m not going to breathe on them and give them smallpox or whatever (though I probably couldn’t stay there too long without getting super-fucked-up from the different atmospheric contents of the time. I DIGRESS.)
BUT. If we are working from the proposition that time’s course can, in fact, be altered, then I would travel back to somewhere around 1998 and tell my high-school self to (a.) study something other than English (b.) work out more (c.) kiss a boy before you graduate (and I would obvs let him know which boys turned out to be gay at school) and (d.) invest heavily in Apple.
Now be honest: how many of you read that last paragraph and thought UMM WHY AREN’T YOU GOING BACK TO TRY TO AVERT WORLD WAR II YOU SELFISH BASTARD? Because it took me about three minutes after writing it to go “…Oh. Hmm.”
Vicky sent me this image earlier today and in the middle of a very hectic workday I have often found myself returning to its browser tab, gazing upon it for a few moments to center myself, like a Zen touchstone.
I must’ve owned every single one of these toys. Clearly my parents had a strong interest in keeping me happy and satisfied… lest I kill again.
Also, the world doesn’t know it, but as mentioned before, the world definitely wants me to write the screenplay for this movie.
Fugazi has been defunct for quite some time now, and it stands to reason that their general absence has led to a drop in the number of new people being turned on to their music. This mix is intended for people who are new to the band, and for those who may need a bit of reminding that Fugazi is and was one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Keep in mind that it was kinda painful getting this set down to 80 minutes — there are soooo many other amazing songs in their discography, so if you like what you hear, please buy the full albums from Dischord, because you will not be disappointed. (I recommend starting with In On The Kill Taker or Red Medicine.) For now, enjoy this mix, and maybe think a bit about why there is virtually no one today making tuneful music nearly as intense as selections like “Facet Squared,” “Public Witness Program,” “Repeater,” or “Reclamation.”
The songs:
Facet Squared / Place Position / Bed For The Scraping / Oh / Closed Captioned / Do You Like Me / Reclamation / Smallpox Champion / Shut The Door / Fell, Destroyed / Waiting Room / Target / Cashout / Give Me The Cure / Song #1 / Blueprint / Suggestion / Caustic Acrostic / Repeater / Public Witness Program / The Argument / Floating Boy
I’m really enjoying this, and it’s making me wonder what my life would be like if I had gotten into them in high school when I was supposed to. During the great emotional trek from middle school to high school, some of my closest friends drifted away into the hardcore scene while I, sad little proto-queer that I was, started running with a much more Lilith Fair crowd. I would be a very, very different person if I’d started listening to Fugazi instead. Especially since I have only belatedly realized my attraction to dudes with tattoos.
