Monday, February 16, 2009
Nu, Again?
It has been said that everything old is new again, but never before has it seemed more true than now - and I mean, never in the history of the planet, with which I enjoy an unrivaled personal familiarity. Lately all kinds of stuff from twenty years ago and more has been coming back to ask me where I’ve been and why haven’t I paid a call. There’s no excuse, really. Some of that old stuff is pretty damn good. Let’s enumerate, inasmuch as this is the whole gist of my post today:
1. Okay, this isn’t going back 20 years but it’s a good place to start: remember CDs? They’re still a pretty useful way to cart music around sometimes, especially when your MP3 player is on the fritz, as ours was till the good folk at the Apple store replaced it FOR FREE for us last week. But even then, sometimes one of us would have the ‘pod and the other would have the car, and the one with the care was stuck with the ignominy of radio because our in-dash CD player has been on the fritz for more than a year. We’d gotten a great disk (Keller Williams, if you must know) for xmas ‘07 and had popped it in the cd player right away, only to have it jam and stick and stop playing. “Eject” was ineffectual. The disk was lodged permanently in the player and we lacked the motivation and resources to repair it. The case stayed in the car as a constant reminder of our audio failings and just in case the disk spontaneously self-ejected at some point, but after twelve months and more that just didn’t seem too likely. Kel had even taken to giving Jesse the empty CD case as a fallback kiddy distractor, when pretzels and emergency road flares stopped entertaining him. At some point, though, she realized that, as he played with the empty CD case, IT WAS NO LONGER EMPTY. Somehow the disk had gotten back inside of it. This, she found mysterious, and she asked me about it the next time we were out driving together. As it turns out, one other old disk was rattling around in the door-side cubby, and I pressed it to the long-latent CD insertion slot to see what would happen. It should have bumped up against the disk already in the slot, impotent and mocking. Instead, it slid right in as if it were the most natural and usual thing in the world, and Bud E. Luv’s “Iron Man” chimed out from our speakers. Somehow, the CD player had repaired itself. It was like waking up to discover that I’d regained the special senses I have in dreams and lose upon waking. “Better than ever” now means “just as good as before” - and that’s good enough by far for me.
2. Old friends, via Facebook: when I started blogging, it was a means to keep up with new friends, basically none of whom I still see anymore. However, shortly thereafter I began to make new, on-line friends, and many of these continue to be among my most cherished acquaintances, even those I’ve never met face-to-face, and even those who no longer keep their own blogs nor read mine. Yes, friends - cyber and real - have come and gone. My core group of friends from college have remained with me, for whom I am eternally grateful. However, I have given almost no thought in all the time since leaving them, of my friends from before college - high school, jr high, and for gods sake elementary school and even pre-school. There were some decent folk in that crowd but I have kept up with almost none of them, and apart from one reunion I have had basically nothing to do with any of them since I ran away from the twerp I’d become by senior year of high school to re-invent my twerpdom anew in college. The weird thing here is that Facebook, that blog for those who do not blog, has suddenly blown up in my face with dozens of erstwhile friends from my formative years. It’s truly blowing my mind that I’ve got a date now to have supper with a dozen people with whom I went to pre-secondary school. Some of them have reminded me why I’d sought their friendship in the first place, and I now regret the many years I’ve let lapse without the pleasure of their company. It’s a repossession of my own social history, and there are a few chapters I actually look forward to expanding upon in the future. I know, I’m as surprised as you are.
3. DYNABALL! Back in my scrawny geeky grade school days (as opposed to my current scrawny geeky days, if you’re keeping score) I had a little exercise device that I really enjoyed - as much for its nerdacious scientific angle as for any actual benefit it did me, since I didn’t use it nearly enough to make a difference. It was a gyroscopic ball in a plastic sphere that was capable of thousands of rotations per minute, generating a powerful isometric force when one rotated it in small circles in the palm of one’s hand. It served me well, if infrequently, until I dropped it on the pavement of my backyard and it broke. Easy come, easy go, eh? Well as it turns out, I wanted another one but it didn’t come nearly as easily as it had gone. I have actually spent the last several decades looking for a replacement. And now I’ve found one. Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to present to you:
Dynaflex!
Apart from the new garish colors, the rubber fist-grip, and the groove for starting it with a little shoelace which is a lot easier than just getting it rolling on a pantleg or by telekinesis, it’s the exact same toy/tool as I recall from my old days as a toy/tool myself. I’m using it on the bus, waiting in line at the Apple Store, during my pre-dawn workouts, and whenever the spirit moves me. It still generates a powerful resistance that runs from my fingers up to my shoulderblade, and one of my colleagues has already gotten one of her own to help her golf game. I can feel the improved strength and vigor of my upper appendages. It’s a nice feeling, and it’s about freaking time.
4. Witch Mountain: All I knew about it at the time ("the time” being around 1978) was that my classmate Ike was in yet another big movie. Ike was among the busiest “real” actors in my jr high, and he regularly was featured in Disney productions, where his malleable androgynous features had made him quite the child-star. And more power to him. I wasn’t auditioning for any of those parts. If he was getting them, I had nothing to complain about and it was something I could brag about to the kids at camp. And now I see that a new Witch Mountain movie is coming out. Ike is not the main attraction in it, nor is Eddie Albert who failed to be returned from the dead to reprise his original role - Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has taken that place. The commercials make it seem a bit higher tech and cooler than the old one appeared to me to be, back when I wasn’t watching it originally. I guess it goes to show me that nothing is beyond being remade. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this time it was actually better than the original, but I’d have to check with Ike about the particulars if I wanted to know for sure. Dwayne probably doesn’t remember it well enough and anyway he never returns my calls anymore since that “smackdown” incident.
5. The Watchmen: I don’t mean to be a Hollywood harpy or to marginalize myself as a comicbook fanboy, but damn I am excited about the upcoming release of The Watchmen. Back in 1986 I started reading the books as they were released once per month over the course of a year, and they remain the only comic books I’ve ever gone out and bought for myself. Not only that, but I read them with scrupulous care, stored them in plastic bags, sealed the bags with velcro and taped them to heavy cardboard, and kept all 12 issues in mint condition in a binder in my closet lo these many years. This is not something I’d do for a typical comic, but then again Watchmen was the only graphic novel that Time Magazine named as one of the 100 best novels of the past century. I’m not going to get into the intricacies of the story, but it’s a good one and very powerful - not escapist, but more the opposite, like a story of what happens when you try to escape but can’t. I’ve been looking forward to a film adaptation since I finished the last book back in ‘87, and the trailer and commercials I’ve seen for the new production suggest to me that my hopes are likely to be fulfilled, at least on a visual level. The film looks gorgeous and the commercials are like panels from the actual books.
And just to humiliate myself a little, let me share how deep my interest lies: here‘s an image of the most dangerous being on the Watchmen planet, Dr. Manhattan… and
here’s a photo of my left calf. I don’t have much ink, but what I’ve got is Watchmen-related. As I said, I’m looking forward to seeing this movie. I don’t think I’ll take the kids.
And now for something a little different: the last post here was about my dolphin shirt. I was asked to post a photo of it, so Blogopolis could make up its own mind how embarrassed I should be for wearing it in public. Never one to shirk my obligation to imaginary strangers, I went out last weekend on a good run in my favorite old T so I could take a representative photo of myself in it. On my way out the door Kel ruminated that she’d probably have to sneak in and burn it for me while I slept. However, immediately after taking this
photo, I went to pull the shirt off over my head and ripped the back of the collar seam in three places. I don’t know if I’ll ever ride the dolphin again now. But at least I know that I sucked every bit of satisfaction I could out of it. Not everything old is new again. Some of it is just regular old old. Speaking of which, I’m getting tired. I think I’ve mined this vein for long enough. Have a good one and keep your history polished and handy. Sometimes it turns out to be more gratifying than you’d anticipated.
