I had a really good chat with Ms. Karen Abernathy on WLOX’s Four O’Clock Show out of Biloxi. It was a blast. Many thanks to her and the whole WLOX team!
Category: Media
Today I Learned a Word: “Googie”
I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV shows like The Rockford Files—shows with a lot of exterior shots of working class cities and suburbs from back then. Once in a while, Rockford will race through Los Angeles and there, flashing by in the background, a McDonald’s from 1976 will appear. Or maybe a Woolworth’s or a Wash King. (Yes, I do realize that most people have never heard of Woolworth’s or Wash King.)
These were the places I would visit with my parents when I was a kid, and it’s kind of neat to see them again, if only on a TV screen. Seeing them today, forty years later, I am often struck by how different the architecture was back then, especially the fast-food joints and coffee shops, many of which were getting on even when Rockford was in his prime. These vintage buildings from the 50s and 60s often had weird, playful curves and tilted walls, all of it stitched together at crazy angles. I remember one restaurant in particular that my mom used to take me to every weekend. It had plastic booths nestled under a rocket-red awning with trippy lights hanging down. It looked like something straight out of The Jetsons.
Continue reading “Today I Learned a Word: “Googie””Read a Classic Novel…Together!!!
My great friend Margaret Luongo and I just released the premier episode of our new YouTube Channel, Read a Classic Novel…Together. In this series, we tackle classic novels that we’ve been meaning to read forever, and we invite the viewer to read each chunk along with us. (We try not to read ahead, but do anyway sometimes. Sorry.)
For this first episode, we take on Part I of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Check it out when you can.
“I’m Probably Wrong About Everything” Podcast Interview
Many thanks to Gerry Fialka for interviewing me on his great podcast. I have no idea why he thought of me, but I’m glad he did. It was fun.
Yes, my lighting sucks. I’m working on it. Check it out anyway, pls…
Why I am Nostalgic for Big-Brained Aliens
All this spring, my son Connor and I have been watching of the original Star Trek on Netflix. Connor likes the original shows almost as much as The Next Generation, and even I find myself getting caught up in some of the more classic episodes like Space Seed (the one with Khan). I also really like the pilot, The Cage. That’s the episode where Jeffrey Hunter is Captain Pike, trapped on a planet run by bubble-headed alien telepaths who throw him in a zoo with the luscious Susan Oliver. (Poor bastard.)
As we watched this particular episode—Connor for the first time, me for the bazillionth—it occurred to me that the Big-Brained Alien is one science fiction trope that has pretty much disappeared. As far as I can tell, it has gone the way of the jet-pack and the glass-tube elevator. This dearth of chrome-domed alien baddies is just another indication, I suppose, of how much things have changed. Back when I was a kid, every extra-terrestrial was guaranteed to have a skull like a beach ball. Even the wise, Christ-like alien Klatuu from Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still had a big head (although this was probably no one’s fault—Michael Rennie just had a big damned head!).
Remember those aliens who want to invite all of humanity over for dinner in the classic Twilight episode, To Serve Man? Huge heads. Or the killer vegetable alien in The Thing. Huge freaking head.
As to how this visual cliché came about in the first place, I can only assume it was because of Anthropology class. Specifically, all those anthropology classes that educated, middle-class kids started taking in college during the Cold War. For the first time, ordinary people began to learn about human evolution, and how the human brain has tripled in size during the last two million years. The implication was obvious. Bigger brains means bigger intellect. To extrapolate this trend into the future led to the obvious conclusion: beings of the future will have enormous brains.
In other words, the original Big Brained Alien is…us.
Continue reading “Why I am Nostalgic for Big-Brained Aliens”Old Band Cheats Death
In keeping with my previous post about Voyager 2 getting a new lease on life, I thought I’d write one about a moment when an old band (well, old by pop standards) made an incredible comeback. Duran Duran, those darlings of the early days of MTV, did it in 1993 with the song Come Undone, which is by far my favorite of their works.
Enjoy!
Why Do YouTube Commercials Suck?
As I get older (and older), I begin to suspect that I will, eventually, become nostalgic about literally everything in my past. Right now, I am feeling nostalgic for old TV commercials.
If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, like me, you watched a lot of TV commercials. Like, thousands and thousands. And as much I hated most of them, at least they were flogging products that I could…you know…actually use.
Since I cut the cable-TV cable a decade ago, most of my TV consumption has been via YouTube, and I have found myself bombarded with ads for various IT groupware products, web hosting sites, industrial-grade machines, religious groups, and exotic home decorations. WTF? How did the vaunted algorithms, in all their wisdom, pick this menu of irrelevancies to inflict on me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love YouTube, and I am grateful that it exists. And I know that they have to pay the bills somehow, so I try to watch the ads. (Yeah, I know, there are ad-blocker plugins out there, but I find myself morally opposed to them.) Still, these ads suck.
So, yeah, I am sentimental about old-world commercials. Here is a classic, landmark ad that I remember from 1977, the same year as Star Wars was released.
Ash Clifton, Writer 