Twenty Eight Years Later

The last twenty-eight years really have flown.  And the perception of various points along that road has gotten strange: I remember some events of 1996 as vividly as something that happened an hour ago; but things that happened last year can be vague and don't seem entirely real. 

On May 19, 1991, I graduated from college.  The very next day I moved into an apartment in The Jackson, on Richmond's Monument Avenue.  Monument Avenue was every bit as stylish as it always had been, but the Jackson Apartments of 1991 (built in 1919) could probably be best described as "genteel decrepitude."  It had once been very fashionable but had roaches that would politely try to bum cigarettes.  Once, when I told the landlord the light switch in the pantry didn't work, he asked if I'd tried changing the light bulb.  Since the light was stuck on, this was not the problem.  And the heat was controlled by a thermostat that couldn't be--well, controlled.  We had to resort to putting an ice pack on top of it to fool the furnace into believing that Richmond was Antarctica. 

We had a great time in those first few months out of college.  We were all perpetually broke; the lucrative futures that William and Mary promised us held out resolutely just out of reach.  Somehow we managed to find money for hooch; we also figured out which bars had free food at happy hour.  Conveniently, one of these was the Hotel Jefferson; if we could scrape together enough money for a couple of gin and tonics (they were $2.50 back then, during happy hour) we could scrounge dinner from the buffet. 

It seems like there was always a party going on in the Jackson.  In retrospect, it's a miracle that we all survived.  Some of the things we did would be frowned on by the more sanctimonious recent generation.  Too, I wonder if our potential for public service has been ruined by something we did (with photographic evidence) in 1991 or '92 that wasn't considered evil or offensive then, may not be now, but very well might be in ten more years. 

Photographs, of course, existed only in the form of actual film.  I took one from behind the windshield of my '85 Buick, looking down Broad street toward downtown.  The big art-deco Central National Bank features prominently. I labeled the photo "I live in the Holy City now!"  When I returned to Richmond in 2013, after an almost-twenty year sojourn in Baltimore, I took a picture from exactly the same place--and used the same caption--but this time, I posted it on Facebook.  Which, by 2033, will probably be just as passe as film is now.

Driving down Broad street always brings back memories for me, but it's shocking to look at that (and other) photos from 1991, to see how many things are nothing but memories.  The shuttered car dealerships of the '90s  (they'd all moved to the burbs by then) have been replaced with the thundering crash of VCU buildings that just keep springing up.  The sketchy McDonalds is just plain gone; so are the antique shops and of course, the department stores. 

There's one other thing that I don't seem to notice anymore.  When we lived in the Jackson, not only the apartment, but the whole city, seemed to have a certain scent to it.  Maybe it was that genteel decrepitude; it seemed to be some combination of honeysuckle, curing tobacco, whiskey and old, unairconditioned buildings.  Twenty-eight years later, it seems to be gone.  Of course, there's less tobacco actually cured in Richmond than there used to be.  The city is a little bit more manicured these days so I suppose there isn't as much honeysuckle, and even the most poverty-stricken apartment houses have air-conditioning now.  And the younger generation doesn't seem to consume whiskey with quite the abandon that we did.  So, there's probably a logical reason that I can't smell that smell anymore.  Or maybe it was just a heady scent that went with youth, good times and a hopeful future, unnoticeable to the resigned nose of middle age. 

A Stroll Down Memory Internet

In my eternal quest to find new and interesting ways to waste time,  I've fallen in love with Google street views.  You can merrily walk through pretty much any town you can think of without having to, you know, walk. Or leave the safety of your home environment, which is no mean consideration when you're slightly agoraphobic. 

Usually, I do my Google-walkin' through places I've never seen before.  I now have no need to actually visit Greensboro; I've seen most of what I wanted to see.  I do have a need to visit Myrtle Beach though because it's a beach. 

Sometimes I Google-walk through places I've been before, but haven't seen in a long time, to see how it's changed or if I remember things properly.  I have a friend visiting from Cape Cod, so I thought I'd have a look around there. 

I visited Cape Cod four times, years ago.  Once was for this friend's wedding; the other three were ostensibly vacation trips.  I say ostensibly because they were neither pleasant nor relaxing; two things that vacation is supposed to be.  I'd gone with the person with whom I was involved at the time.  The relationship hadn't yet gone toenails-up; so that wasn't the issue.  The issue is that I am from the South and Cape Cod is just all-around very, aggressively Northern. 

I remember that the first thing that struck me was the oddness of the names.  We have Indian-based names in Virginia too, but they sound different.  Onset? The onset of what, exactly? Mashpee? I mean, seriously, your town has the word  "pee" in it.  And then there's the Northern tendency to use the same name, with directions, for five different towns.  Dennis, East Dennis, South Dennis...  The landscape is weird; since the cape is windswept pretty much constantly, the trees are stunted.  Everything is very sandy. 

And I remember that the ocean is very, very cold, even in summertime, and that the sand doesn't seem rough but must be, because I'd end each of these trips with my feet sliced to ribbons. Reaching the actual beach from where we stayed was like the Bataan Death March except there wasn't even a movie made about it.  The restaurants were very expensive and not very good, at least to my taste. 

Mostly, I remember that I felt very much out of place.  All of the people I was with had grown up taking vacations like this; I'd grown up going to the beaches of the mid-Atlantic and was used to water you could actually swim in, boardwalks and Maryland seafood. 

It's fairly unlikely that I'll ever be on  Cape Cod again, so Google-walking around it was a convenient way to refresh my memory without the ten hour drive and the hurty sand.  It was actually kind of nice to see that it is pretty much as I remembered it, and astonishing to realize that the last time I saw most of this stuff was twenty-five years ago.  There's been a lot of water under the Bourne Bridge since then.  It's also unlikely that I'll ever see most of the people who were there with me again, either, but on most of the streets I could picture them (or at least their 1995 selves) very clearly.  I can almost  picture 1995 Me there, too, confused and frustrated by everything around me.  1995 Me didn't have the vaguest clue what 2019 Me would be doing, but certainly didn't think I'd be visiting him via Interwebs.

Fear and Snooping

A perk of teaching 9th grade (trust--they're few and far between) is the ready availability of young adult literature.  I enjoy seeing the new stuff that's coming out and it's fun to revisit favorites from years ago (in my case, MANY years ago).  With an awful lot of testing sessions this time of year, I end up with more downtime than I'd like, so...

I took a look at two that I recalled from childhood.  One holds up very well; the other not so much.

Virginia Hamilton's The House of Dies Drear had largely faded from my memory, except for the name.  First published in 1968, the name seems pretty hokey.  I mean, really--"Dies Drear?" OK, we get it.  This is going to be a spooky story.  But it worked, didn't it? After forty years I remembered the title.  Since I didn't remember anything else about it, I decided to give it a shot. 

It turned out to be pretty good.  The titular Mr. Drear was an Ohio abolitionist; his house (a giant mansard-roofed pile) was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  In the present, our juvenile protagonist, Thomas Small, moves into the house with his history professor dad, his mom and younger twin brothers. Weirdness commences almost immediately; there's a huge old caretaker named Pluto, lots of secret passages and requisite freaky threatening neighbors. On their first night in the house someone sneaks in and hangs triangular symbols on the family's bedroom doors. 

This is still a young adult piece, so nothing REALLY horrific happens, but it's enough to give you the willies all the same.  There's a bit of a Scooby Doo ending in which nothing is actually supernatural, but the work of...well, no spoilers. 

An interesting aspect of the novel is that the principal characters are all black--but, unlike most novels featuring minority characters, Dies Drear doesn't overtly disclose this until well into the book, when the Small family attends church and Dad talks about the importance of church within the black community.  I found this rather significant.  Hamilton chooses to focus on developing her characters as individuals rather than obsessing over race.  She still acknowledges the importance of cultural background, but lets you get to know the characters first.  You aren't coerced into making assumptions about them. 

Since it's a Gothic novel aimed at the junior high set, it doesn't really have too many elements that would date it terribly.  Sure, the weird caretaker and the weird neighbors use horses to get around, but that's pretty clearly to heighten the reader's understanding that they're weird.  A haunted house is a haunted house, and this one is worth keeping. 

When I was eight (I'm basing this on the knowledge that I was in the third grade), I was forbidden to read--or rather, to continue reading--Harriet the Spy.  This would be because I, following in the ill-advised, but interesting, footsteps of the title character, decided to start recording my observations.  Unfortunately, some of the things that I documented were, while quite true, not very nice.  (Sorry, but I bet that cross-eyed kid did feel weird.)

I forgot about Harriet until (I thought a few years ago, but turns out it was 1996--time flies when you're getting old) a movie version was released.  I didn't see the movie and, now, forty-ish years since my mother told me to stop reading it and twenty-three years after the movie, I got around to finishing the damn book.

It really isn't that bad, and if my mother had let me read the whole thing, I would have gotten the full morality play treatment.  It's pleasantly unsaccharine.  Harriet doesn't learn not to be naughty.  She learns that sometimes the truth is better left unsaid. 

Which is probably a very 1964 way of looking at things; it wasn't quite as much of  black-and-white moral.  (Oh, the book was published in '64.)  Young adult literature has a habit, by necessity, of being as up-to-date as possible.  Obviously, the authors need to appeal to their target audience, and their target audience has little interest in anything that's more than a week out of style.  This tends to serve the authors very well, bankroll-wise, but doesn't serve their work very well longevity-wise.  Harriet is no exception: with its blocky, pen-and-ink caricaturish illustrations, it's already a dead giveaway for 1964.  Add in Harriet's family situation.  Dad works in television; he and Mom go to lavish parties every weekend for which they must don full evening attire.  When she's not at school--a private one--she's mostly raised by her nurse, Ole Golly.  Oh, and of course they live in New York, but in 1964 upper middle class people like this still existed in New York. Harriet wants to be a writer; her friend Sport wants to...guess?  and her friend Janie has a chemistry set and wants to blow up the world.  Oh, and Sport's dad is an alcoholic writer (couldn't get away with that one in modern YA lit).  Also, the parents of the kid group gossip about each other relentlessly. 

So it really is 1964 in a nutshell:  lots of reinforced stereotypes, especially the Italian family (I wonder if those even still exist in Manhattan?).  You get the petty world of Harriet's parents, a crazy cat guy, a bonbon eating old bat, a sports-crazed boy, and then you get the Girl Power characters of Harriet and Janie. 

The themes ring true, and are constant--but it's spoiled for modern YA audiences by being very dated.  While my students would probably enjoy The House of Dies Drear,  Harriet is entrenched too deeply in a world that most teens can no longer understand. It's rather a pity that Mom didn't let me finish it; I might have learned that no matter how great a person's faults, one mustn't point them out.  I wonder if that cross-eyed kid ever got surgery.

See Barbarella Do Her Thing!

Oh, God, please don't.  See her do her thing, that is.  Because if you do, that's almost two hours of your life that you will never get back and believe me, you could spend it doing something infinitely more enjoyable and productive, like having cholera or a really long dream about being naked in math class.

I do love me a good bad movie, but sweet baby Jesus, Barbarella is so bad that it can't even be good bad.  Mind you I did fall asleep twice, but that's fifteen minutes of suck upon which I can cast no aspersions.  The first time, S.O. woke me up when I started nodding; the second time he just figured that I wasn't missing much and said the hell with it. 

The movie's plot is fairly basic; it's a standard good space person saving universe from bad space person sort of thing.  It opens with the theme song, "Barbarella Psychedella," which warbles melodiously at us as we get to  O̶M̶G̶ ̶B̶O̶O̶B̶I̶E̶S̶   watch Jane Fonda undress in...what the hell? OK, we're in a spaceship...lined with FUN FUR???  Also BOOBIES!!

So apparently Jane/Barbarella is an Earthling who's being dispatched to a different galaxy where  Durand Durand (yes, the band is named for the character) is developing a bad thing that will make people do something I really don't remember because it already made no sense and seemed incredibly dumb.  Then Jane crash lands on Planet Doodlebop where she's attacked by malevolent children with bitey dolls.  Then she attempts to hook up with a gilded angel, whose primary point seems to  provide boy eyecandy to balance Jane, but in a very "gay or just European?" way.  Oh, she's also saved from the bitey dolls by a dude who wants sex for repayment...real sex, not the pill kind that Jane's people back on Earth now employ!  So TITillating! Then the big bad, some saiks-crazed Italian broad who calls Jane "Pretty-Pretty" (I mean I guess she's not bad, but...kind of pushing the envelope a little bit) tries to get it on with her and the evil children and/or birds from hell show up until some dude named Dildano shows up and eventually all is well and the angel (whose name is Pygar, by the way--inspiration for the dragons in Dig Dug?) even saves the bad guy. 

Despite what should be a pretty basic plot, it really doesn't make any sense, so I didn't bother reporting it accurately because I don't really care and it wouldn't help you out much.  The plot is, like the acting, obviously NOT the point of this turkey.  All of the fun fur, the sexy Italian, the gilded angel, Jane gasping "Pyyyeeegarrrr!" in her dippy California-girl accent--it's all to put across a pretty specific, and pretty lame, point--1968 style.

Naughty things like boobs and fun fur and psychedelia had, of course, been around for a long time (well, not fun fur, but I sort of like to think of it as an objet eternel).  But they hadn't been around in the public eye for long and they hadn't really been much on the public movie screen at all.  Hollywood was trying to cash in on the newly hip...hippies, without actually being either hippie or hip.  It's kind of like when Sears tries to pass its clothes off as high fashion.  Nice try, but...

This movie kind of sums up what annoys me overall about the culture of the late 60s and early 70s.  It tries to be weird, edgy, sexy, modern and shocking all at the same time while not really being any of the above.  And, like the era that produced it, by trying too hard it fails at everything--including entertainment. 

Rehi, y'all.

My, but it's been a long time, hasn't it?  After a hiatus of--eep! four and a half years, I figured it might just be time to jump-start this here blog thing.  If anyone is still linked to this thing and is surprised by seeing a notification for the first time since the Earth's crust cooled, suffice it to say that there have been quite a few changes in my world in the past four years.  They're not really worth mentioning; even my cats are only pretending to listen.  Well, three of them are; Daisy went to be with Kitty Jesus in 2015.  I'm still living in Richmond, but no longer solo; I currently reside with Wally, Pickle and Zor the Wonder Cats and Significant Other, also known as He Who Forgets to Refill the Ice Trays. 

Let the observations of foibles, follies and foolishness recommence.