#Throwback Thursday: February 2006

I remember that night! Joe had just installed an editing tool on his Mac. I was cooking and he said "Come here and look at this!" 
So I came over to see. He had his webcam set to this Warhol mode, and he was laughing. Just as I was saying, "Whaaaaat?" he snapped this frame. We don't remember what tool that was and this is the only time Joey took a screen shot. There's a printed version of this framed, on the wall in his studio. He's the best, I love him so much.

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Facebook? That was never a secret.

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The Phone Is Not The Problem

This week is when I try to figure out what makes sense about 

people, 

who have bought a product, 

criticizing the company that makes the product, 

because people are getting too much use out of the product they bought. 

What chapter of The Modern Capitalism Handbook deals with this?

"What Is She Talking About?"

If your kid is addicted to her iPhone, doesn't that seem like a problem that would be solved not by the iPhone's maker, but by you, their actual parents? To my ears, the crazy is busting out with this aggressive blaming, specifically of the device, and the company. In the BLOGCAST video I talk about my mom limiting my TV, but same goes true for the phone. Like when I was twelve and called all those "story lines" and then my mom got a huge big phone bill and so I was banned from the phone when she wasn't home. I certainly didn't get my own phone. I couldn't be trusted, no phone for me. Now, with this "study" that they're demanding of Apple. What do we expect the data will show, hmmmm? I'd expect the results will start off showing phone use across OX, how many hours a day, using what platforms, which apps, and it'll show the geo-locations of all these children. Here's my question: shouldn't every mom and dad already be in control of knowing all that stuff about their own actual kid's phone use, especially the fallout, which is: should they be using the phone this much? When we were kids, "the phone" was just a phone, but the approximate analog version of this whole conversation would have been, "I don't want you watching that goddamn General Hospital! And no Atari until you finish your homework! And no calling Colleen until after 7, for fuck's sake! Go outside! And stay where I can see you." Or is Apple now in charge of all that pesky stuff. "Parental controls," are you freakin' kidding me.

Further Reading

If you are concerned about the increasingly negative impact of technology (which is really no laughing matter, despite my laughing about this "Apple is ruining our kids" iPhone story) then I recommend you check out an online publication called The Technoskeptic. They take a serious look at our dependence on tech of all kinds, and what you can personally do to avoid the pitfalls of  "too much technology." There are articles and a podcast. Please donate if you can. 

Visit

And here's a link to the Reuters story:

Apple says it looks out for kids, as investors cite phone 'addiction'

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The Star Wars Holiday Special : Merry Gen X'mas

Long ago in a galaxy we 40-somethings refer to as "childhood," we built a cherry Kool-Aid world with rad high tech toys like Lite Brite, Etch-a-Sketch, and Slinky...a popular (*cheap*) birthday present. Imagine every one of us rug rats fighting over a toy you play with on the stairs. We made our own fun, too. Get a pair of tube socks and you could slide across the linoleum, or shuffle out some sweet static on the shag carpet. I'm sayin', a kid in 1970s America could make a pretty good time out of not-much, because we had a ton of not-much.

There wasn't much on TV either, so you watched your favorite shows, which aired weekly on specific nights. There was one TV and four channels, so there were fights over who got to pick until bedtime, then the adults watched boring shows (Dynasty, Flamingo Road) followed by the news, until the TV went off overnight. I don't mean the TV got turned off...I'm saying the broadcast transmitter shut down its signal and went to static until morning.

In our house we loved Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Dukes of Hazzard, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. Up until they started to air commercials for the Star Wars Holiday Special, we thought Battle of the Network Stars was the absolute peak awesome sauce of "special" programming. I mean I assume we went apeshit over the idea of a Star Wars special, but I can't verify, because personally, somehow I have no memory of seeing The Star Wars Holiday Special. I might have blocked it out. We'll come back to that later.

Life Day

The Star Wars Holiday Special takes place in a vague point along the Star Wars timeline, opening with the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon—Han Solo and Chewbacca are attempting to evade a garbage scow in a tense scene. Evasive maneuvers! It's a promising start, but the excitement is woefully betrayed by the next million minutes. There's musical numbers, comedy skits, and at one point there is an un-related cartoon for no reason.

The whole thing hinges on Chewbacca's plight of making it back home for the Wookie holiday. Back on the Wookie home planet his family waits for his return. There's his son Lumpy, and his grizzled father whose name, cringeworthily, is Itchy. His wife Malla is anxiously awaiting Chewbacca and the family bickers because of the tense situation. There are long...surprisingly long...spans of angst-ridden Wookie howling, which is the loudest kind of Wookie howling. It just keeps going on, while Malla urgently seeks news of the Millennium Falcon's whereabouts.

The Guest Stars

Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll. Put another way: who? Even my cool teenage cousins weren't old enough to know any of those people, which begs the question, "Who dafuq was this special for?" Kids, in theory, but in that case, they couldn't have gotten Wonder Woman or the Fonz at least so we'd have some joy of recognition? Performances include Bea Arthur (pre-Golden Girls!) as a bar owner who intones a ponderous ballad that lasts about a week. Harvey Korman does a few different skits, like one where Lumpy reads a technical manual and Korman appears to be acting out the instructions. What fun‒a dramatic reading...of instructions? Was this some sort of zany wacky fun for Grandpa? Although it could be suggested, with that skit, that Harvey Korman may have invented Max Headroom.

The Tech

Our shit was still analog in those days. Lest we forget. A Slinky is a coiled spring. Etch-a-Sketch let us scrape right-angles with magnets. And Lite Brite's entire operating system was a light bulb. In the Star Wars Holiday Special, there was great promise in the cool factor, like when Malla places video calls to Luke, Leia and Art Carney (okay?) to see if any of them had heard from Chewie or Han Solo, because they're still not home and it's almost Life Day. Kudos for the sci-fi, because video calls weren't a common thing  yet. But those scenes, as it turned out, were the only appearances of our beloved Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and R2D2. I am sure my cool teenage cousins said "Aw maaaan! Rip off!" There's promise when we notice that Chewbacca's son Lumpy owns that cool hologram game table from Star Wars. You know, when they're heading to Alderaan and Chewie plays a game against R2D2, when C3P0 says  "Let the Wookie win, R2!" But Lumpy uses the game table to call up a hologram dance troupe, and they jump around for about a month. Bor. Ing. There's even a Virtual Reality visor.

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As kids we saw more cool tech in sci-fi and fantasy and the world has a lot of people to thank for today's devices. Most of which are used for porn. And I don't even mean guys like Steve Jobs. I mean the nerd herd who popularized this stuff, artists and writers like Bruce Vilanche. The Star Wars special showed us VR on November 17, 1978, with a Wookiee head-mounted display. And yes, of course it was used for a wack segment of Wookie space porn. The company that would later become Sun Microsystems would put out the first virtual reality(VR) products almost a decade later, in 1987, including head-mounted displays (HMDs)and data gloves.

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The Space Porn

The award for Most Awkward guest performance goes to Diahann Carroll. Again, I looked it up to see where we kids might have known her from when the Star Wars special aired. According to my research, she was on Milton Berle. Again: WHO WAS THIS SPECIAL FOR? In her scene, Miz Carroll emerges from a kaleidoscopic field of light as a mermaid sex vixen, and all of this action appears inside the Virtual Reality visor worn by Chewbacca's dad while everyone waits for the Millennium Falcon to arrive for Life Day. What to say about this scene? It's pretty much soft space porn. Working a lotta bare shoulder action, mermaid sex vixen sighs and undulates and croons. She porn-whispers "I am your fantasy." The old ass Wookie grunts and moans in his special chair. She says, "I am your experience. So experience me." He seems to be doing just that. She says, "I am your pleasure. Enjoy me. This is our moment together in time that we might turn this moment into an eternity." She sings a song for about a million hours. And let me hit you with that again:

"This is our moment together in time that we might turn this moment into an eternity."

Dude, what.


The Mental Block

We would have given up our Reggie Bars for anything Star Wars-related, so I should remember the special. But I don't. Does anyone remember it? Maybe we were so sugar-torqued that we couldn't sit through all those loooong, boring guests. I know we definitely for suresville would not have sat through that softcore cyber booty scene with a mermaid lady and a old-ass Wookie. Our brains would have sent alarms and we'd be a streak of flammable pajamas racing away in a flurry of Hawaiian Punch and Cookie Crisp crumbs.

But now that we're older and we have more viewing options (and weed) the Star Wars Holiday Special is available on YouTube, and we'll probably stream it several times each and every holiday season. Have a Life Day party. Smoke it if it's legal, and have a happy Life Day! ⭐

Watch it on YouTube:

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Straddling the Great Digital Divide

What I love most about being a true blue Gen X'er is our passage from analog to digital. There's something comforting in the shared experience of taking a flying leap together across a great technological chasm. From Etch-A-Sketch to iPad, from wall-tethered telephones to iPhones. Technology moved fast during our lifetime. We climbed the mountain, we surfed the wave, we sped along the information superhighway with all the windows open. We optimized for mobile like champs. Ours was a triumphant, graceful grand jete across the great digital divide.

So imagine my horror when I presented as a fumble-fingered old lady at CVS in front of the young pharmacy clerk. Mortified. The girl could hardly hide her snicker as I attempted to pay (for my old lady blood pressure medicine no less) with my debit card. Seems I don't quite have the hang of the new "chip card" yet. First I tried to swipe my card, then I stuck it into the slot backwards, then I took it out of the slot too soon. I found myself in defense mode, babbling about Gen X and straddling the great digital divide. Finally I managed to pay the girl. Used my iPhone to summon an Uber ride home just to reassure myself about my friendly, fearless relationship with modern tech.

Did you get your chip card yet? If not, allow me to explain why your magnetic stripe cards have become quite obsolete. I looked it up.

We don't "swipe" at the register anymore. We "dip." You have to insert (you know what, I am never going to say "dip," I'm sorry) the chip-end of the card into the base of the payment device, keep it in there for about a week (it isn't fast like swiping) and then you can enter your PIN and proceed as before. 

The chip card is the rare tech that was not designed for consumer convenience, hence its slowness. What you've got there, chief, is a tiny little microprocessor for security. Unlike our old magnetic stripes, which use the same digital cardholder ID for every transaction, the chip generates a new number every time you use it. The stripes were easier prey for card fraudsters who could easily copy the stripe once and use it until you caught on and cancelled your card. The chip is secure like the vault codes in a Vegas casino. They keep changing. It's the same microprocessor built into the new "mobile wallet" on smart phones.

And so basically, the reason for the new dippy chip thing is because of rampant card fraud thievery. Damn criminals. This is why we can't have nice things.

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Music Makers and Dreamers of Dreams

When I was 24 years old, I found it necessary to retract and re-submit my *theory about musicians and just what the hell is their deal anyway. This happened all in my head, in the high seats at Foxboro Stadium at approximately 8 o’clock on May 20, 1994. My theory? Please note, I was a wee bit baked, and Pink Floyd, on the Boston stop of the Division Bell tour, had just opened with Astronomy Domine, from their tragically underrated 1966 album Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
[*sex bots]

Aliens. Musicians are descendants of an enlightened alien race that landed an unknowable number of millennia ago and integrated (kinda) with early mankind. When expertly applied, especially at night, the mambo, the wang dang doodle, the rock and roll, the boogie woogie, are all syno for the same wordless body & soul communication: Sex! Music, singing and dancing all lead to sex. Maybe it's the other way around. Either way, inter-species hanky panky, moving and grooving with each other, resulting in mixed alien-human babies, means here we all are now: we are the incomprehensibly complex descendants of a rock & soul interplanetary bop and we have retained this cosmic knowledge. To compress massive volumes into one nearly indefinable word, we named that "talent." Some extraordinary talents just walk around earth, saying stuff, acting like everything they can do is normal. Granted, the reviews have been mixed.

I assume what these randy galactic travelers were trying to do was bring to earth a universal language so that mankind could communicate irrespective of spoken word. At first with just voice, sticks and rocks. Then animal hides, bones and gourds. Then wood, ebony and ivory and Mozart. Then electricity and steel and Jimi Hendrix. It gets quite complicated after that, because technology and Bob Moog and those guys we don't think of as "rock stars" but nevertheless changed the world. [See also Chapter 5, "Cosmik Debris," search term "giraffe filled with whipped cream," Chapter 7, "Movers and Shakers" search term "Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy," Chapter 10, "Gods and Monsters," search term "Tonto," all of Chapters (Prince symbol) through 😭 and in fact most of the rest of the book.]

Musicians manipulate the air, causing particles to collide and vibrate into what they call "notes." They control the rate of these vibrations by shaping time into specific pulses they call "beats." It gets more complicated after that, I'll do a diagram or something later. But this talent is as close to magic as you can get, is it not? Within and between the notes and beats is a mysterious kind of unteachable "something." Music can bring people together, convey wisdom and trigger memory. Music grants courage, provides comfort and nurtures love and laughter. Music can define, amplify and connect ideas. This is a force so powerful that it frames time and space, defines entire regions and speaks for generations.

In theory, any of us likely have some degree of talent somewhere in the bloodline. Think of your worst cousin who can somehow play the spoons for some reason. But in reality, it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you'll get the musical talent without the proper gift of expression. We call those "teachers" or "sound guys" and they're great. But sometimes it's the other way around, and we call those "writers" or "comedians" and they should not be picking up the guitar but they do so don't leave one around when you invite them over. Sometimes there's no obvious explanation, which is when you get a Michael McKean and have to sort that out for yourself. All of these talents are all terribly important and should be thanked and appreciated often. Pay them. Bring them food. Tip them. Offer coffee. PAY THEM. Share your weed. Get Cheez-its. You wanna watch out for that horn section. Don't go to sleep on them drummers. Pay. Them.

Attempt to live without music for one hour. Don't even hum for that hour. Tell someone about that hour. Then consider buying music from one of these independent sex aliens from another planet.

We idolize our rock stars. But generally speaking, oddly enough, we've endured roughly a century of disrespect for future rock stars. Stop making that noise, cut your hair, go work in a bank, you're a bum unless you're getting paid for your time, and conveniently, through an unexplained series of events, nobody wants to pay for music anymore. Like it ain't no big thing. Dare to dream the dreams, future rock stars. As though anyone could stop you.∎

Paypal

Do you like this so far? I really hope so.
Paypal $1 or $10 would help a lot and I'll make sure you get the book! I promise I'll write it. Trust me, I'm a writer. I'm also making some little gifts for $50 and up...

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We're Doing "News" Wrong

Maybe it's because I'm a *card-carrying member of the TV-addled generation who can remember a time when "the news" was actually the news, but I am sick of all the crap, know what I'm sayin'? People are tripping. It's too much.

* It's just an old defunct video store membership card.  



In our super low budge deadest-end of Connecticut's ramshackle urban sprawl, we got the daily local, The Waterbury Republican, and my father bought the New York Daily News on Sundays. The paper was pink for awhile in the 80s for some reason, and there was often an athlete or TV star on the front page, plus it had an fat center section with crosswords and Find-Its and advice columns and contests, plus sometimes you'd find a large foldout poster—maybe a New York Yankee. We kids caught bits of info, such as "ketchup is a vegetable" and "trees cause pollution." Because Reagan.

Then there was the radio and TV talking heads who read news out loud to you while you babysat your brother, who sat on the floor in his superhero Underoos and practiced spelling out BOOBLESS on your brand new digital calculator.

The only TV in the house was in the den if you were a reg'luh Amerikun, in the parlour ("pah-ler") if you were Sicilian. The set was the size of a VW bug, and it didn't have to match the furniture because it was furniture. Like all quality technology (including the car) parts of the TV simulated some sort of wood. You twirled that UHF dial when nobody was looking, just to see what happened. When you got a new TV, it just got placed on top of the old TV. Thankfully that meant putting away into the sticky-back photo album all those photos of you and your brother in short-shorts, tall socks and eyeglasses the size of car windshields. 

Before cable television and the Internet ushered forth the 24-hour news cycle, the news was actually news. The news spread when you went to the movies with your friends. That's when you told each other what happened that day, what you read, what you saw, what happened at home, last weekend at camp, last month at your grandfather's funeral, last night on the 25th Anniversary of Motown, did you see that? You didn't!? It was like totally awesome! If only there was a way that you could see it, but it was already on TV, see, so you missed it...but let me tell you all about it...remind me.

Communication Nation

Back in the days when you couldn't wordlessly post a link (which is like lobbing a thought-grenade back over your shoulder as you run by) it was necessary to convey expression every time you communicated with people, and because that contact was either via telephone or in person, people heard your voice and/or saw your face. Expression. As technology has moved more and more of our personal interactions online, we can only do our best at expression in text form. Hence the emoticon, and shortcuts that stand in for our most expressive moments. LOL.

Local calls free, long distance rates better after 7pm on weeknights.

Remember time limits for the phone? Remember stretching the cord so you could talk to your friends as far from the family as possible, which sometimes involved a broom closet. In those days, an exchange with someone that wasn't in the room with you was not a perpetual entity; when you were at home with your family, all of your friends were at home with their families, too. You would call and communicate when you both had time and opportunity for the conversation, and during the communication you were each other's sole audience.

I specifically called Michelle when Dr. Noah Drake appeared on General Hospital for the first time, because she was babysitting her brother too, just like I was, and between making the bologna sandwiches for the little boys, and all their whining, they were always making us miss stuff. "You were my Rick Springfield friend," Michelle told me recently. When I saw Motown 25, I called Simone to make sure she was watching it, then we talked about it for like...twenty years, with a gap in the middle before we found each other...on Facebook. When we were kids, Simone was my Michael Jackson friend. Dude, she had the red jacket. 

Enter Facebook

Social networks, having taken the place of actually having to talk to your friends deliberately, are a vital organ in the gargantuan info-monster that never sleeps. While it's nice to be in touch with everyone that I miss seeing IRL, by the same token, I found out Michael Jackson died on Facebook. I think I would have preferred a phone call from one friend. It's TOO MANY FRIENDS all talking at once about Michael Jackson. It's too overwhelming. Could you imagine receiving 600 phone calls to tell you that Michael Jackson died?  IT'S TOO MUCH, I TELL YOU.

How to NEWS Better

• Watch your local TV news

• Read the local paper 

• Tune into BBC now and then for an unbiased take on how we're doing, they got no "USA! USA!" rubbish
  

• Look for community-oriented sources, such as women's news, and seek out black analysts, school-supported sources aimed at parents & families, and so forth...sign up to get info from outside your bubble, whatever your bubble may be

• Flip it over to CSPAN so you can see what these so-called representatives are doing when they think nobody is watching. 

  

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