Anonymous Communist

Normally, I’m the one looking for bikes. This one found me.

Years ago in college, I had a crappy Web page (built by my non-code-knowing ass with Adobe PageMill) that had pictures of my two Schwinns and my friends’ bikes. Apparently, a gentleman who lived in southern Illinois and had a bike to unload found that Web page, unbeknownst to me.

One day, I get a call from my mom, who tells me some guy who lives in West Frankfort or some such town called my parents’ house in Springfield trying to contact me about a bike. I got his number and proceeded to play phone tag for a couple weeks until I finally got a hold of him.

He told me how he had this tandem and was looking to get rid of it. He said he was going through a divorce, and that the sight of a bicycle built for two was too painful seeing how his riding partner was leaving him and all. He knew of my appreciation for old Schwinns from my Web page and asked if I was interested.

I could barely restrain my enthusiasm in answering “yes.” But because I neither had a truck nor knew anyone who did, picking it up presented a problem. Don’t worry about it, he said, offering to come to Carbondale to conduct the transaction.

So I told him to meet me at Travel Service when my shift ended at 4 p.m., and $80 later this sucka was mine. I remember feeling a little silly riding a tandem by myself, but that was the only was I was getting it home, which at the time was a tiny two-room apartment. This enormous bicycle took up half the space in my kitchen.

As far as I can tell, everything on this bike is original, including the tires, which are cracked with age but still hold air somewhat. It still has the teardrop rear reflector with the silk-screened “S” intact. The paint is in great shape (for a 43-year-old bike, that is) with only a few noticeable scratches, and the decals and screens are excellent as well, especially on the chainguard:

Unfortunately, the chrome is not in such great shape. Overall, it’s mostly dull with only a few shiny spots, and rust has set in in a few places. The front wheel was in kind of bad shape; it took extra elbow grease to clean it up. But I guess that’s what years of disuse will do.

The Twinn hasn’t been ridden since probably 1999 or so. Back then, Mrs. Communist and I lived on Walnut Street, in between Lawrence and Canedy. Sitting on the back, she understandably gets kind of nervous not being able to engage her instinct to steer, and riding a bike on a busy street like Walnut was not something she wanted to do more than once.

But now that we live in a quieter area and the kids are old enough to ride bikes, maybe the old Twinn can start getting some use.

Within about two seconds of this morning’s shaking subsiding, there were two children and a dog climbing into bed. Luckily, I was so tired that the adrenalin wore off quickly. I still had two hours of sleep to pack in before the alarm went off.

I was probably 11 years old the last time I was in the midst of an Earthquake. My parents were out of town for the weekend, kicking it 19th-century style in Amish country (presumably before those quaint folks got all tweaked out on methamphetamine. The Amish, not my parents.). I was placed in the charge of my brother and sister (both older, emphasis on the old) and her soon-to-be-husband.

With the cats away, we mice decided to go play at Swensen’s for dinner. It was just up the street from our house, in the space now occupied by the muumuu shop big-n-tall men’s store in Sherwood Plaza. And since there were four of us, we decided to tackle their big-ass sundae. The San Francisco-based Swensen’s called their creation with eight scoops of ice cream and every conceivable topping … wait for it… the Earthquake.

We totally wrecked that shit, too. I think we were fighting over the last traces of the caramel and hot fudge. After waddling home, we played cards. Spoons, to be specific. (Scoring in Spoons is like Horse: Each time you lose a round, you’re given a letter of the word “spoons.”) Us three dudes were beating my sister so badly that she had spelled “SPOONS” within about 10 minutes. We handicapped her by letting her spell out “earthquake” instead.

Good times.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t get anything for Mrs. Communist. It’s OK, though; we both agree that it’s a stupid, made-up holiday. What she really wants already is in the fridge anyway, chilling inside brown bottles.

Valentine’s Day did, however, play a role in our courtship back in the day.

Our story begins in January 1993, and we were beginning our final semester at Southeast. As such, I wasn’t about to make life hard on myself by taking trigonometry first hour; I’d coasted through Larry Garrison’s first-hour college algebra class the previous semester and “earned” a C for my “effort.” Good enough!

The future Mrs. Communist also was in Larry G’s class. She claims that she tried flirting during class; I recall being too busy trying to stay awake to notice much of anything.

So instead of trig, I decided to take first-hour pottery. I hadn’t taken any art classes during high school, mainly because I have nary an artistic fiber in my body. But it wasn’t math, and a friend of mine (who also was friends with the future Mrs. C) said he was getting into first-hour pottery, so I figured I, too, could play in the mud for an hour.

Forward to that semester’s first day, and I’m late for school. Mr. Linderman had everybody from both first-hour art classes in the front art room, so the room was packed. Not wanting to draw attention to my tardiness, I check for any empty stools close to the door before walking in. Naturally, the only one available was the one next to … *gulp* … the future Mrs. C, who apparently also had decided to take pottery.

Panic started to wash over me. I contemplated dropping pottery and getting back into trig. The future Mrs. C was, at that time, probably the last person on Earth I wanted to sit next to, even though she was the only person on Earth I wanted to sit next to. I’d harbored a crush on her since seventh grade, but I was convinced that she thought I was a tool because of a snarky comment she’d made about my eyebrows (eyebrow, actually) in my ninth-grade yearbook.

I manage to sack up enough to walk in and whisper something stupid like “Is this seat taken?” even though it was plain to anyone who wasn’t dead that nobody was sitting there. That first day of pottery class still ranks in my Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Moments.

It didn’t take long, though, for that trepidation to disappear, and soon we were fast friends, conversing in a most friendly manner. Mrs. C says that she was flirting her ass off. I, being extremely dense, still had no clue.

Then on Valentine’s Day, we had run into each other in between periods that afternoon. We chatted briefly, and before we went our separate ways she gave me a handful of Conversation Hearts. I thanked her, scooped them up and shoved them in my mouth as I walked away. It’s a good thing the future Mrs. C was as determined as I was dense, because that kind of made her mad.

Years later, Mrs. C informed me that the Conversation Hearts she had given me that day were picked out specifically and lovingly for the messages on them and that I was supposed to have noticed those messages and then acted accordingly. Did I tell you I was dense?

This “Zits” strip from a few years back eerily parallels the incident:

Without a doubt, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” was the best show on Saturday mornings during the 1980s.

It basically was the kids-TV version of a Salvador Dali painting, featuring numerous non-human characters like Conky, Chairry, Globy and Pteri. There also were many human inhabitants of Pee Wee’s world: Miss Yvonne, Ricardo, the King of Cartoons, and, of course, Cowboy Curtis, played by a young Laurence Fishburne. S. Epatha Merkerson played Reba the Mail Lady, who arguably was the lone straight character on the show, one who viewed Pee Wee’s surreal world with a detached bemusement.

The show also featured the musical stylings of Danny Elfman, Cyndi Lauper, who sung the theme song, and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, who would go onto work on “Yo Gabba Gabba,” another brilliant show and one that is deeply influence by “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.”

Anyway, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d post a video of the first few minutes of “Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special,” which inexplicably features singing U.S. Marines. The Corps most definitely got theirs that day.

You may remember him from such movies as “Back to the Future” and “Teachers.” This is from a 1987 appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman”:

For more of the genius of Crispin Glover, check out “Clowny Clown Clown.”

Hat tip to Your Neighbor.

There are few subgenres of rock music more loathsome than hair metal. Or poodle rock, or butt rock, or cock rock, whatever you want to call it. It all sucks.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, hair metal enjoyed unchallenged popularity on MTV, which was most kids’ main source of music back then (and which actually played music videos). You couldn’t go more than one or two videos without one of those shitty bands in lipstick and blush, dressed in skintight leather pants festooned with bandannas flinging their poodle haircuts about.

Even “Headbanger’s Ball,” where all the actual metal videos were relegated, was overrun with crap like Trixter and Warrant. Perhaps that was because in its early days, The Ball was hosted by Mr. Poodle Haircut himself, Adam Curry.

This kind of music burns its candle of suckitude on both ends. The vapid lyrical content, over-reverbed drums, self-indulgent weedly-weedly guitar solos and scalded-cat vocals are bad enough. It’s the image that these bands project is what makes them doubly loathsome. What is cool about making yourself look as womanly as possible by troweling makeup on and teasing your hair? MTV should have run a contest for girls back in the day: “Win a dream date with Poison, where you can trade makeup and hair secrets!” The stage antics of these bands were just as ridiculous as the way they looked: Singers twirling microphones, guitarists throwing their “axes” over their shoulders, drummers flipping their sticks, etc. It’s all contrived and corny and probably learned at Musicians Institute.

Thankfully, by the early 1990s other bands had come along to relegate hair metal to the cutout bin of musical history. On with the list:

5. “Girl School,” Britny Fox – I don’t recall this one getting a lot of daytime play on MTV. But did it ever rule “Headbanger’s Ball.” You had to sit through two or three videos such as this to get to one from Anthrax or Suicidal Tendencies. It doesn’t take a genius to be able to infer the content of the video from the song’s title.

4. “More Than Words,” Extreme – This song should have been called “Baby I Wanna Fuck You.” It’s not your typical chorusy, reverby, overwrought hair-metal power ballad, but with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the lyrics fulfill two of the three main hair-metal cliches: partying, fucking and loving you forever. You can guess which two this song has.

3. The entire “Hysteria” album, Def Leppard – There was a time when Def Leppard didn’t suck. In the early 1980s, they actually were considered among the top acts of the so-called New Wave of British Metal. And as an 8-year-old with two teenaged siblings, I thought the “Pyromania” album (”Onda-gleeben-glouten-globen!”) was the cat’s ass. I listened to that record so much that I even memorized the vinyl noises in between songs on my brother’s copy. But something happened in between “Pyromania” and “Hysteria” that turned this band into garbage. Maybe it was the drummer losing his arm, maybe it was my evolving musical tastes. But during seventh grade, this album spawned a never-ending stream crappy videos, epitomized by:

2. “Unskinny Bop,” Poison – This song contains possibly the worst lyric in the history of recorded music: “Like gasoline you wanna pump me.” Seriously… what the fuck?

1. “I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes),” Steelheart – Coming at the tail end of hair-metal’s “relevance,” this song very well could have been the one to lower the hair-metal casket into its grave. It neatly encapsulates most of hair-metal cliches: The parentheticized song title; the over-chorused arpeggiated acoustic guitar intro; the over-reverbed drums, of which there are a ridiculous amount; and, of course, the eardrum-perforating, upper-register screeching of the lead singer. Please remove all pets and small children from the room before the end of the video.

In the late 1980s, hair metal, along with R&B counterpart new jack swing, was soulless, corporate music at its acme that even a moderately intelligent 13-year-old could see through. And after seeing these videos again 15 years later, it is music that, even with the benefit of nostalgia, has not gotten any better with age.

Most of my music listening gets done with the iPod on shuffle. Driving to work yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised when this shuffled up:

Ahh… this brings up good memories of the Spring 1995 semester in Boomer II. If I could only remember…

That’s the future Mrs. C and me, in love before we actually knew.

I hear Shoo’s going to Lollapalooza.

Of course, I’ve heard of few artists on the slate (Ghostland Observatory? Elvis Perkins in Dearland?) and actually heard even fewer. I still hold fond memories of Lollapalooza 1992. I remember it like it was yesterday…

Our story starts with my dear friend Chris, who is a wonderful human being as well as extremely intelligent. He’s also a bit eccentric, in my opinion. We go to his house to pick him up, and he walks out with two cartons of Kool-Aid Koolers, the ones in the plastic bottles. Which would be fine if you’re 6 years old. Except we (me, Chris, Eric and Steve) were all 17.

We gave him a well-deserved hard time about his beverage choice along with a warning:

“Dude, they’re not gonna let you bring that shit in.”

He was skeptical, to say the least, and assured us he would be enjoying his delicious and totally not-overpackaged children’s beverages while rocking out.

We finally get to the World Music Theater (now awesomely named First Midwest Bank Music Theater) and hike the approximately 18.2 miles through the parking lot. As we get the business from the security peeps, Chris is informed that indeed, he is not allowed to bring in outside foodstuffs.

Crestfallen, he is faced with a dilemma: Walk all the way back to the car or pitch his precious potables. Of course, given that his three non-Kool-Aid-carrying cohorts already had gone inside, he didn’t have much of a choice. After enduring getting his balls broken by his unsympathetic friends, he vowed to get his bevies back on the way out.

(In the long run, Chris had the last laugh. He became a successful pediatrician, and we, well… didn’t.)

We must have gotten to the show late, because Temple of the Dog is listed as the opening act and the first band we saw was Lush. I had very little use for their music at the time. I was deeply immersed in all things Rock back then, and Lush’s music was all reverby and atmospheric (music that I now appreciate) and sounded like every other band Eric and Steve listened to at the time: Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Swervedriver, etc., and were thusly dismissed. I was just a stupid kid back then.

The skies opened up in between Lush and the next band.

(more…)

Here’s a classic posse cut from back in the day.

This clip clocks in at more than six minutes, but it’s worth it for the following reasons:

1. A young Alyssa Milano and Jason Bateman are in it;
2. It’s from about 1987;
3. Appearing as King Koopa: A rapping Christopher “Mr. Belvedere” Hewitt.

Enjoy!

An “attaboy” to Shoo for finding “I’m Gonna Get You.” But I found one that could be his theme song: “I’ve Been Thinking About Shoo” by Londonbeat.

Full disclosure: I actually purchased this song off of iTunes, and it sits in a prominent place in my “Guilty Pleasures” playlist, along with “How Bizarre” and “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” among other musical travesties.