The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

The Year Punk Didn't Break

I liked Bradford Martin's piece in Salon about what all the "Nevermind" anniversary celebrations are missing, but my favorite part was this passage:

 Though "Smells Like Teen Spirit" compelled a wider circle of fans to listen, this does not necessarily add up to the "voice of a generation" mantle the popular media fastened on Cobain. It's more accurate to see his celebrity as an uncanny symbol of a vibrant minority of the era's young who considered themselves outside the mainstream.

Bingo. 

If the kids I went to school with owned a copy of Nevermind,it was for the same reason they owned Appetite for Destruction or Metallica's "black album" or The Chronic: because it was what kids listened to. Then again, the kids I graduated with seemed to love the music of their parents' generation. And that seemed to mean Billy Joel and Bob Seger more than, say, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Very few of us saw Nevermind as a transforming moment. I don't even think I was one of them, weird little semi-outcast that I was. Nevermind and Nirvana helped build my tastes, but so did the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Pearl Jam's Ten and even the Stone Temple Pilots' Core.

Its single "Plush" was pretty inescapable in 1993, but I think one of the reasons I gravitated to them was that Scott Weiland was the first rocker I'd seen on MTV who didn't have long hair, a look I didn't want/wasn't allowed to cultivate.

And I was a few months behind on Nevermind-mania anyway. We didn't watch a lot of MTV in our house, so "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came and went without me noticing. (The first time I "heard" it was a top 40 station's parody version: sung by a Julie Andrews sound alike. Oh, T-102, you are not missed.)

The first Nirvana song I actually heard was "In Bloom," the second track from Nevermind. I can remember WHERE I was too: it was the spring of 1992, near the end of my freshman year. I was in the lockerroom, and we were getting into costume for the opening night of our school play (Brigadoon).

And it was amazing. But so was "Space Oddity" and "Under Pressure" and "Bicycle Race," all of which I heard for the first time that night.

It wasn't until the end of high school, after Kurt Cobain had died, that I got deeper into the band. I don't think it was a bandwagon thing; if anything, Nirvana was even less popular then, and the singer's suicide had made him kind of a joke among some of my peers (and to my eternal shame, I participated in some of that post-death mocking).

But by the time 1995 rolled around, Nirvana had expanded its catalogue, with another album, a collection of B-sides, and the haunting "Unplugged in New York" record. And I'd read up on the band; both Michael Azerrad's Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana and Gina Arnold's Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana showed me how the band was formed.

That reading led to the Pixies, the Pixies to Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth to Beck (so, so much more than "Loser," I'd learn)...and so on.

This isn't a unique story, I know.  A lot of kids can say the same thing. Nirvana, for us, wasn't a Paul on the road to Damascus moment; it was simply the start of a journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Result of My Friend Frank Using the Phrase "National Lampoon's Jedi Academy"

Some background: On Facebook yesterday, my friend Frank sent a message to me and another friend, talking about a block party he'd been to. While the smaller kids played with toy light sabres, their parents played a game of beer pong.

"It was like National Lampoons Jedi-Academy," he said, which set off the following conversation. I've rearranged it a bit so it matches the chronology of the Animal House plot.

 

Frank: Who delivered a live rancor to the alumni dinner? Who dumped a truck-load of fizzies into the Sarlacc Pitt? Every fall the trees are covered in toilet paper, every spring, a Death Star explodes.

 

Frank: Adventure? Exitement? A Delta Tau Chi pledge craves not these things.

 

Frank: "I gave my love a wookie, that had no home, I gave my love a bantha on dune seas it roamed, My love for you is a story that"...<force lightning destroys guitar, Master Bluto stares> "Luminous beings are we, not made of these crude lyrics"

 

Jerry: "IS THAT A...NERF HERDER!?!"

 

Tom: They can't do that to our droids. Only WE can do that to our droids!!

 

Frank: Yoda: "Young Skywalker, appointed are you to become the special social representative to Chancellor Palpatine"
Anakin: "Great! What do I have to do?"
Obi-Won: "It means you have to make the Kessel Run to the FOOD KING!"

 

Frank: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or used the jedi mind trick on our female party guests - we did. But you can't hold a whole jedi order responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted padawan learners. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole Jedi Order? And if the whole Jedi Order system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Senator Palpatine - isn't this an indictment of our entire Galactic Republic? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the Republic of Naboo. Gentlemen!

 

Frank: THE JAWAS STOLE OUR DATES!

 

Jerry: They're even taking the stuff we didn't steal, like the power converters from Toshi Station.

 

Tom: Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to defeat the dark side.

 

Tom: Face it, Luke, you threw up ON Jabba.

 

Jerry: "Was it over when the Empire blew up Tatooine? HELL NO!" "Tatooine?"
"Forget it, he's rolling.

 

Frank: Grand Moff Tarkin! Grand Moff Tarkin! For God's Sake, they're looting the FoodKing!

 

Jerry: (Scene during the rebel attack on the Second Death Star. Commotion.)

"ALL IS WELL! ALL IS WELL!!!!!"

 

Frank: Senator & Mrs. Han Solo '64, Coruscant.
Chewbacca "The Wookie" '64: Whereabouts Unknown
Jar-Jar Bink '68: Psychiatrist, Encounters Inc.
Anakin Skywalker '64: Dark Lord of Sith, Galactic Imperial Army, '66. Killed by his own son, battle of Endor 1969.
C-3P0 '64: Aid to Emporer Palpatine 1967. Indicted & Convicted '72. Smashed to a million pieces at the spice mines of kessel, '74.

 

What I've Been Watching: "Why Can't You Be More Like Game of Thrones" Edition

 
Dear Pillars of the Earth,

My girlfriend was/is on your side, and she and I are usually simpatico when it comes to TV shows. But I suspect that may change when she finally sees Game of Thrones, which did the whole medieval political intrigue much, much better.

What's that you say? Game of Thrones isn't really "medieval" because it takes place in a fictional universe?

Too bad. Putting aside the fact that it's based on the "War of the Roses," GoT's universe still feels more real and authentic than yours, dragons and direwolves and all.

Honestly, there were times I felt like I was watching a Dickens adaptation. You gave us heroes who are impossibly noble, villains who are eeeeeeeeeeeeevil, long-buried secrets, a sprawling cast of characters, and (spoiler alert) an ending in which the wicked are punished and our heroes prosper.

That's fine for Dickens, less so when adapting a novel written 22 years ago.

And it's not like I wanted a Game of Thrones clone, just more nuance in your characters, and much, much more tension in your story. It seemed like any time a problem was introduced or a plot was formed, it would be resolved/put into motion in the next scene.

You assembled an impressive cast: Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Hayley Atwell (above), plus Donald Sutherland and a wasted Alison Pill and stuck them with weak material.

The intersections of power/religion/war/politics/art/lust could have made for a powerful series. What we got was pandering nonsense that I thought TV had left behind decades ago.

 

 

Shine On, Black Diamond

I mean no disrespect to any readers who are living there, but Ashland -- the town where I grew up -- seems like a sadder place every time I go back.

Part of it is just the passage of time: other than my grandmother, the rest of my family lives elsewhere, giving me less and less of a connection to this place where I spent my first 18 years.

Someone else lives in the house where I grew up. 

Behind that house there’s the Willow Park.

In the 1980s, the borough had all but abandoned it (or so it appeared to me back then), making it a perfect place for 9-12 year old boys. Who needed actual playground equipment when we could build elaborate tree forts and carry out an invisible, one-sided war against teenagers who rode through the woods?

But now the Willow Park is an actual, well, park, with benches and swings and a softball field.

Equally depressing: there’s an entire block of downtown Ashland where nearly every building is for sale or rent. (Including the dearly departed, oddly named Gay Store, which deserves an entry of its own someday soon.)

The only thing left is a tobacco store. There wasn’t even enough business to support a fucking dollar store.

None of this, however, makes me as sad as the loss of Black Diamond Video.

My Friend the Liar

I've been interviewing politicians and other government officials on a regular basis for 13 years now, and I'm sure at least some of them have lied to me.

But I couldn't tell you what any of those lies were. None of them were as memorable as the ones told to me by Keith Mullin, my best friend when I was 11-years-old.

With two working parents, I spent a lot of time growing up with my grandfather, who lived a few blocks from us. Keith * lived next door. We'd known each other for years, but somehow became closer friends when I was 11, drawn together by nothing more geography and a love for the G.I. Joe cartoon and action figures.

There was little else we had in common. I was a mouse of a boy, Catholic school student, altar boy, bookworm. Keith had knives, rode his bike too fast, used the word "ain't," and didn't own a winter coat.

Neither of us had parents who bought us toy whenever we wanted, which meant our G.I. Joe collections were far from complete, forcing us to improvise.

In our scenarios, COBRA was still a "terroristic organization," the way the cartoons described it. But here, it was more like the terrorists I saw on the news in 1987. The COBRA guys drove around in beat-up old cars and vans, not high-tech tanks.

(Something about that made the play experience more enjoyable back then; it seemed more authentic, or as authentic as you could get when dealing with a snake-themed paramilitary group.)

Other times, we'd explore "the bank," a dangerous wooded area filled with junk and sinkholes.

("Bank" was, I think, short for "embankment." "Don't go over the bank," was a pretty familiar warning in the neighborhood growing up, one that Keith and I other more daring kids ignored. Years later, my brother and I -- with the help of our uncle -- would make a very, very low-grade horror movie called "The Thing From Over the Bank." Keith was no longer in the picture at that point, which is too bad, because he'd have been great.)

And as Keith and I became friends, I started hearing from other kids about the stories Keith would tell.