And I can smell the history on the breeze
I had a successful first visit with my new PCP! There was a slight last-minute snafu over whether it was virtual or in person! She agrees that I am dealing with a lot! Have some links.
1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."
3. Josh O'Connor interviews well and is correct that I had never heard of the cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill.
4. I tend to like the song no matter what, but this is an especially nice chamber-darkwave take: Emilie Autumn, "The Passenger."
5. I am not an audiobook person, but I might have to listen to Bill Nighy reading the footnotes.
I came home last night and told Autolycus that I had just seen a movie with a heroic black cat. In other news, Hocus Pocus (1993) has been some kind of stone classic New England horror-comedy for the last twenty-eight years and I just found out now. Rush-That-Speaks showed it to me; I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem and I loved it. I can see why it confused audiences on release. Its mix of slapstick comedy and gloves-off horror is the sort of thing I would have expected in the early '90's from Joe Dante or Sam Raimi, not live-action Disney, even without the fact that it is also kind of a musical. It really doesn't behave like the coming-of-age teen comedy its modern-day plot initially resembles, when its hero's virgin status is more folklorically than socially significant and his most important relationship is with his younger sister, which does not prevent him from figuring out how to get past a shallow crush to a somewhat battle-forged friendship with a girl his own age. Its witch lore is not only good—this film must have taught an entire generation how to ward with salt—it's nasty in ways where I have to start pointing to Gemma Files or Jeanette Winterson or Warlock (1987) for comparable examples of casual, reliable, historically-reputed malice. I was floored that its exteriors were actually filmed in Salem and Marblehead, but the slant of the roofs was unmistakably New England. I am moderately surprised that I never ran into it at a party in middle school, but I would have remembered the experience: the plot is pretty much a dead heat between things I would have enjoyed recognizing and things I wouldn't have wanted in my head for years. (No one, not even our protagonists wondering what's keeping their parents as dawn approaches, seems to realize how close the entire adult population of Salem came to going the way of The Red Shoes. This movie wouldn't have introduced me to the concept of immortality as a curse, but the thought of being mourned and driven away unrecognized by the parents whom you must outlive is the sort of thing that bothers me even now.) The untestable litmus is not the precise ratio of folklore studies to nightmare fuel, however, but whether I would have imprinted as strongly as all other signs indicate on Doug Jones' Billy Butcherson. The last person I saw with that body language was Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. I had seen little of Sarah Jessica Parker and zero of Kathy Najimy prior to this movie and they should have been genre stalwarts in addition to their other talents; especially the former achieves a remarkable otherworldliness while still being a spider-eating airhead. Between Winifred Sanderson and Rose Hovick, 1993 was some banner year for Bette Midler and those characters should never meet. I can't figure out if this film missed its zeitgeist by ten years in either direction or should just never have been released in summer, but I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered to the point of an upcoming sequel, which neither of us was expecting when we took to IMDb to look up the young actors who weren't Thora Birch. I spent my entire life scrupulously avoiding Salem during the month of October and just had no idea.
1. By an elsenet friend: on Gen X music, Clear Channel, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
2. Courtesy of
rushthatspeaks: "How the Moomins became an anti-fascist symbol."3. Josh O'Connor interviews well and is correct that I had never heard of the cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill.
4. I tend to like the song no matter what, but this is an especially nice chamber-darkwave take: Emilie Autumn, "The Passenger."
5. I am not an audiobook person, but I might have to listen to Bill Nighy reading the footnotes.
I came home last night and told Autolycus that I had just seen a movie with a heroic black cat. In other news, Hocus Pocus (1993) has been some kind of stone classic New England horror-comedy for the last twenty-eight years and I just found out now. Rush-That-Speaks showed it to me; I am even a hard sell on fiction of real witches at Salem and I loved it. I can see why it confused audiences on release. Its mix of slapstick comedy and gloves-off horror is the sort of thing I would have expected in the early '90's from Joe Dante or Sam Raimi, not live-action Disney, even without the fact that it is also kind of a musical. It really doesn't behave like the coming-of-age teen comedy its modern-day plot initially resembles, when its hero's virgin status is more folklorically than socially significant and his most important relationship is with his younger sister, which does not prevent him from figuring out how to get past a shallow crush to a somewhat battle-forged friendship with a girl his own age. Its witch lore is not only good—this film must have taught an entire generation how to ward with salt—it's nasty in ways where I have to start pointing to Gemma Files or Jeanette Winterson or Warlock (1987) for comparable examples of casual, reliable, historically-reputed malice. I was floored that its exteriors were actually filmed in Salem and Marblehead, but the slant of the roofs was unmistakably New England. I am moderately surprised that I never ran into it at a party in middle school, but I would have remembered the experience: the plot is pretty much a dead heat between things I would have enjoyed recognizing and things I wouldn't have wanted in my head for years. (No one, not even our protagonists wondering what's keeping their parents as dawn approaches, seems to realize how close the entire adult population of Salem came to going the way of The Red Shoes. This movie wouldn't have introduced me to the concept of immortality as a curse, but the thought of being mourned and driven away unrecognized by the parents whom you must outlive is the sort of thing that bothers me even now.) The untestable litmus is not the precise ratio of folklore studies to nightmare fuel, however, but whether I would have imprinted as strongly as all other signs indicate on Doug Jones' Billy Butcherson. The last person I saw with that body language was Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. I had seen little of Sarah Jessica Parker and zero of Kathy Najimy prior to this movie and they should have been genre stalwarts in addition to their other talents; especially the former achieves a remarkable otherworldliness while still being a spider-eating airhead. Between Winifred Sanderson and Rose Hovick, 1993 was some banner year for Bette Midler and those characters should never meet. I can't figure out if this film missed its zeitgeist by ten years in either direction or should just never have been released in summer, but I am delighted it has been celebrated and rediscovered to the point of an upcoming sequel, which neither of us was expecting when we took to IMDb to look up the young actors who weren't Thora Birch. I spent my entire life scrupulously avoiding Salem during the month of October and just had no idea.
no subject
We may just disagree on this thread: the line you quote is one of the reasons it didn't read like fancy justification to me because it acknowledges that if your ideal musical era was not the alternative rock scene of the early-to-mid-'90's, then the radio consolidation may not have affected your listening experience. (It didn't affect mine because most of the music I was listening to in the '90's was either classical or folk and even when it was contemporary rock or pop, I was encountering it primarily in the form of cassettes, CDs, and music videos. In high school, I listened specifically to Standing Room Only on WERS and sometimes All A Cappella because it was on immediately afterward. Also whatever kind of folk happened to be playing on WUMB.) I was interested in the history of the homogenization of commercial radio and by his comment about the erasure of women from rock airplay. The other factor is that although I don't listen to his show, I encounter him enough on other social media to know that he both listens to and promotes current artists as opposed to being one of the DJs whose playlists are all nostalgia-fests, which I am completely willing to acknowledge is not obvious from that thread. But I would also have disagreed with his OP for completely different reasons, namely that slating all art in every era and ascribing any opinions to the contrary to a nostalgia filter strikes me as one of the definitions of not helping.
no subject
- I liked the music when I was a teenager better than I like the music now.
- I liked a category of music as a teen that is very unpopular now and I'm sad that other categories are more popular and here are some factors why my genre lost out to other genres.
- Consolidation of radio stations through the mid-90s into the 2000s made radio playlists more homogenous in various markets and narrowed the range of what was able to get popular in affected genres, and I think this is bad for the diversity of music overall.
I mean, all of this is pretty uncontroversial stuff. What I'm having a profound knee-jerk reaction to - and I admit that this is a me thing - is all of this being rolled together into the general category of "Pop culture when I was a kid was objectively better than pop culture now" because that profoundly has not been my experience, I think is extremely subjective and depends on what you're into.
I may just be misreading him, but I think I would have been completely on board with his thesis if it was framed as "There's a reason why you think popular music sucks now, it's because the genres you loved as a teen have become much less popular due to [interesting reasons why], and this happens to every generation for different reasons." It's the framing of it as something uniquely terrible that happened to Gen X and torpedoed quality music forever that I - speaking as a Gen X'er! - am bouncing off hard.
But obviously YMMV, and no worries about that.