2002-04-20 - 3:27 p.m.
So it�s supposedly the year 2002, yet I turn on CNN and the big "Breaking News" story is about how a B-list Hollywood celebrity has just been arrested for allegedly murdering his wife.
Remember six months ago, right after 9/11, when "everything changed"? When the American people were hardening themselves for war and no longer had time for idle gossip about dissolute movie stars and libidinous politicians? When the American media suddenly rediscovered journalistic integrity and vowed, by gum, to start bringing us real news about things that mattered? Remember that?
Yeah, I thought I did, too.
Welcome to Texlahoma, the planet where it�s always 1994. Here are your baggy pants, your Spice Girls CD, and your autographed copy of The Contract With America. Word!
***
In other news, my brother fell 20 feet while rock-climbing last week, knocking himself unconscious and fracturing two vertebrae. He�s out of the hospital now, but he has to wear both a back and neck brace for 6-8 weeks and is currently recuperating at my parents� house, where he can�t do all that much but wait and discover the joys of vicodin until he�s healed enough to get himself out of bed in the morning without Mom�s or Dad�s help.
Obviously, it could have been much worse, but it still really sucks to be my brother at the moment.
My Mom (to me over the phone): "I thought I was done with this kind of stuff when you moved out."
Heh.
***
Alas, alas, The Gobbler is no more!I knew I should have stopped there that one time I was in Wisconsin, if only to take one of those Sargon heads home with me. Now I�ll never get the chance. Waah.
I stopped being ashamed of my fondness for �60s and �70s kitsch design a long time ago. Sure, half of it is ugly as sin and the other half can give you acid flashbacks even if you�ve never taken acid--but it also has whimsy and character and a sort of guileless tackiness that today�s pastel and franchise-dominated landscape sorely lacks. I don�t just feel that way because I�m an ironic GenXer, either; I actually remember when such things were new and hip and commonplace (ok, except The Gobbler--I highly doubt "hip" and "commonplace" were ever used to describe it, even in Wisconsin), so there are equal parts nostalgia and sense-memory mixed in with my sense of camp. God help me for admitting this, but the musty smell of Dacron and the warm glow of a spun-fiberglass pendant lamp whisper "home" to me and the steady disappearance of such artifacts leaves me feeling old and bereft.
San Diego still has a few vintage examples--more of them than my old neighborhood in L.A.--but they�re gradually fading away too. There�s one restaurant here, in particular--the food was only passable, but I always enjoyed eating there anyway because all the burnt-orange vinyl and chrome-edged formica tables reminded my Inner Child of similar places I used to eat at on family road-trips. But then the place was remodeled a year ago, and all the vintage decor was ripped out in favor of focus-group-tested faux-vintage decor blatantly geared toward people who know nothing of such things outside of Quentin Tarantino movies. And yet the food�s still mediocre. I still eat there every so often, but it�s not the same.
Oh well. Just wait 30 years. By then today�s blandness will be tomorrow�s trendiness, brown will be the new black, and a new generation of jaded hipsters will transform the beige stucco and blond wood of your average Econolodge into the last word in retro-ugly-chic. Plus ca change and all that crap.
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