Hey, gang. I’m honored to share here that my poem “school shooter” was featured this morning over at Winedrunk Sidewalk: Shipwrecked in Trumpland. I am quite grateful to Editor John Grochalski for allowing me to share my voice there.
Winedrunk Sidewalk is an online venue featuring poetry, fiction, art and photography inspired by the Age of Trump — 365 days a year. It’s a great place to share your impressions with other Americans, and it’s also easy to submit your own work.
You think that 80’s kids are old? Well, I also have memories of the 1970’s; after all, they fully occupied the first seven years of my life.
And I remember “Donny and Marie” (1976-1979), which ran on ABC. It was a sanity-challenging, Kafkaesque combination of disco, country music, family entertainment, themed-comedy skits, sequined outfits and … ice-skating. Which made it either the height of 70’s cheese or the very nadir of Western civilization — you decide.
I’m embarrassed to admit here that I loved it, even if I was a tot at the time. (Hey, if you’re five or six years old, then the sight of Donny being a non-threatening goofball on stage was the very height of hilarity.) You can see what I mean in the second clip below, if you can stomach all four minutes of it.
What’s interesting about this show is that it was kind of a dinosaur in its time … variety shows had been on the decline for a while in the late 1970’s, and were already being supplanted by the situation comedies that would become the trademark of the 1980’s. Bizarrely, NBC tried to launch Marie in her own solo variety show during the 1980-81 television season, but it just didn’t catch on. It was cancelled after seven episodes.
What’s truly crazy is that Donny and Marie are still performing in Las Vegas. I kid you not. Google it. You can even see them tonight at The Flamingo. There’s at least a chance that they’re immortal vampires.
Postscript: I at first typed “Donny and Maurie” in that blog post headline, and I feel certain there’s a terrible joke hiding there somewhere about Donny hearing the results of paternity test on “Maury Povich.” That would make a great “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
What’s with all the people in music videos looking so damn young these days? Did they change the child labor laws?
There was a time when I was daily viewer of MTV (the sedate stuff on VH-1 was for old people), and I rocked hard, people. It seemed to me that whenever I watched a video, I saw people who were my own age.
Now these videos are inhabited only by people who look young enough to be my kids. And that makes sense, because … they kinda are young enough. (Yes, I realize the video below for The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go” was made 18 years ago, but that’s beside the point.) If the performers in a video today were in their very early 20’s, then they’d be about the right age, if I’d fathered kids when I was 26.
Furthermore, some astute commentators pointed out online Monday night that 2019 is the year in which the original “Blade Runner” (1982) was set. The opening title card names “November, 2019” as the time when all things Fordesque turn angsty and existential and killer-androidy. Am I … older than Harrison Ford’s character? I am six years older than Ford was when he made the film.
Now I just feel weird. Why do I write these blog posts, anyway?
[Update: Today I am learning that “Akira” (1988) and “The Running Man” (1987) also set their stories in 2019?! That’s ironic, given that the future we’ve come closest to is that of 2006’s “Idiocracy.”
I wonder how people in our parents’ generation felt when 2001 arrived, if they’d happened to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” in theaters in 1968.]
Under the familiar weight
Of winter, conscience and the State,
In loose formations of good cheer,
Love, language, loneliness and fear,
Towards the habits of next year,
Along the streets the people flow,
Singing or sighing as they go:
Exalte, piano, or in doubt,
All our reflections turn about
A common meditative norm,
Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.
Make sure you have a designated driver! Or, better yet … why not be the designated driver? What better way to spend the first hours of 2019 than as a hero to the people around you (maybe not the hero that Gotham deserves, but the hero it needs right now)?
I’m not sure how I’ve gotten to become such a mother hen in my old age … Maybe it’s because, in my younger days, I was the one who needed mother henning.
Whatever, just don’t wind up like Gatsby, floating face down in the pool at the end of the night. (But go ahead and totally be him up until that point.)
Postscript — the quote below, which I rather like, doesn’t appear in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or its 2013 film treatment with Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m told that the line actually originates from “Sex and the City” (1998 – 2004).
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 