The Barryfest Chronicles

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Into The Wild for the first time.  It was a pretty fascinating movie, and my fascination with the incredible cinematography and flawless acting was no doubt heightened by the fact that I hit the trees pretty hard before I popped in the DVD.  If the movie hadn’t been based on a true story, I would have called bullshit on the whole premise, and the extreme details of Chris McCandless’ ill-fated journey would have came off as completely overwrought sentimental cheese if the action in the movie (or at least a non-dramatized approximation of it) didn’t actually happen at some point in time.

Because not only were his travels unconventional to start with, but by the end of the movie I was convinced that they were also completely emblematic of a particular moment in history.  While the early 1990s are nearly two decades old,  Into The Wild isn’t exactly a period piece.  The setting is very familiar (it has cars, credit cards, fast food restaurants, television, etc) and yet the differences that exist are striking.

Alexander Supertramp was very likely riding the crest of the final, awesome wave of casual hitch hiking in the United States of America.  I’ve done my fair share of driving around this great country, and I have never – not once, not a single time in my entire life – seen someone on the side of the road trying to thumb a ride.  I am not even going to waste time to try to figure out how or why the practice is all but eradicated, because the mere fact that is does not seem to exist anymore proves my point.  What was unusual but plausible just a few years ago seems like science fiction in this day and age.  Especially when you are really, really high.

And it goes beyond Into The Wild.  I got to thinking and realized that the majority of the action in the movie takes place between 1990 and 1992, with also just so happened to be the  heyday of a novel concept know as MTV’s Rock ‘N Jock.  For those of you who do not remember Rock ‘N Jock, let me give you the rundown:  Professional athletes would team up with celebrities to play in pickup softball, baseball, basketball and football games.

These games were loosely officiated and featured people making millions of dollars a year at their day jobs muscling up to try to hit a 350 foot home run off a tee or launch a ball four stories into the air to score a 100 point basket.  If there ever was a high water mark of unnecessary risk, Rock ‘N Jock was surely it.

This type of shit would go over like a lead balloon nowadays.  The caliber of talent that would ostensibly be standing shoulder to shoulder with Dean Cain and Roger McDowell don’t even participate in the Home Run Derby or Slam Dunk contests of their actual professional leagues anymore for risk of injury or other negative effects the exhibitions may have on their form or function.  With the exception of Dhani Jones and his inexplicable quest to tackle the globe, the riskiest thing a modern day professional athlete does in the off-season is have sex with Madonna.

Another staple of the 1990s:  Seinfeld.  Now, Seinfeld isn’t exactly dated in the way that, say, a show like Deadwood is, but there are anachronisms in almost every episode that serve as constant reminders that the show originally aired in a different era.  The main characters aren’t rocking afros in apartments decked out with shag carpet, but there are no cell phones, people bring four carry-on bags to the airport and Jerry needs a blank VHS tape to record the evening’s Mets game.

Even later episodes like “The Nap” which aired in 1997,  Jerry called in a bomb threat to Yankee Stadium so George could escape from under his desk, where he had recently discovered he could catch a snooze during his work day.  It is a funny premise, but is there any doubt that a scene like that, if it happened on How I Met Your Mother, My Boys or any other show set in the present, would come off as completely improbable?  That type of shit (along with countless other instances of hijinx featured on the show) is just no longer a joke.

But because of the huge amount of  things I find completely bizarre about days not so far removed from the ones we are living in, I wonder if this is just the natural order of things when it comes to hindsight.  I mean, I am just reaching the age in which I can summon lucid memories of events in my life that took place over a decade ago, so maybe I am still getting the hang of this whole “retrospective” thing.

I can imagine that it won’t be long before we are all reminiscing about the strange days when Lil’ Wayne had a blog on ESPN.com and would show up on 1st and 10 and have debates with that contrarian prick Skip Bayless.  And history is already turning on the XFL, P. Diddy’s Making The Band and Sarah Palin, so I guess that sooner or later everything looks pretty weird when you see it in your rear view mirror.  I just didn’t realize it happens so quickly.

I’ve always believed that if you make a habit of putting yourself in unusual situations, you can’t really get that upset when shit starts to get weird. And if you’re also prone to tipping the karmic scales with such flights of fancy as gratuitous alcohol consumption, light prescription drug abuse and unconventional party itineraries, you’re likely to find yourself on the business end of weird more often than not. With this in mind, I guess you could say I got exactly what I deserved when I decided to head into the French Quarter on a Monday evening last week.

Given the fact it was so early in the week, it didn’t surprise me when I encountered far fewer barkers in the middle of the street holding up signs advertising the drink specials or lack of cover featured at the trashy saloons that line the front of Bourbon Street than I was used to.  But even in this relatively serene setting, hip hop was still pulsing out of a fair share of dance clubs that were most certainly open for business.

I’ve heard “Lollipop” at least 350 times in the last year, but the song takes on a bizarrely fascinating and frightening sheen when it is accompanied by a tubby waitress sporting coke-bottle glasses and visible c-section scars gyrating on top of a bar in a haunting manner that is at once repulsive and mesmerizing.  That was the scene just beyond the threshold of a sparsely populated bar known as The Old Opera House, and even though I should be immune to the allure of Tha Carter III by now, the morbidly intriguing nature of what I was looking at gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I like to think of myself as a wise music connoisseur with eclectic taste, I have been pretty closed minded about “new music” for the better part of my adult life.  With the exception of Wilco, Lil’ Wayne, and Prince, I only regularly listened to music that was made before I was born.  I wouldn’t call it a rule, it was just an ethos that was pretty effective at keeping my CD collection and iPod full of rocking tuneskis for all these years.

It stands to figure that the music that was created for the 50,000 years before I existed deserves more attention than what has been put on wax since the year of our lord 1984.  I mean, even a great band like Talking Heads hit their creative peak by 1983 with Speaking in Tongues, so I figured the arbitrary, unofficial policy that governed my music consumption was firm but fair.

Sure, I was a big Sublime fan in middle school, went through a solid rap phase in high school and painstakingly assembled playlists filled with one hit wonders from the 80s and 90s during college; but even during these flights of fancy, when I was looking for a new fix, I thought I would be better served by digging into T.Rex’s canon than by picking up the new Snow Patrol album. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Scott Van Pelt,

I only became a regular listener to sports radio since I have come down here to New Orleans, as my morning commute changed from the six block walk I had in Minneapolis (a trip just long enough to expose you to the extremes of Minnesota weather but too short to help you fully shake off a hangover from the night before) to my current 15-20 minute drive to the office.

The only other time in my life that I regularly listened to any radio at all was back in high school, which was the last time I regularly drove before the invention of iPods.  And for a variety of reasons, I did not listen to sports radio back then.  In a major sports city like Chicago, the radio waves are full of local sports talk shows hosted by fat, obnoxious, bigoted homers hailing from the South Side.  You even find these fucking mopes for a few hours here and there on the ESPN affiliate, so there is really nowhere on the AM waves to hide from these shitbirds.  And besides, I was perfectly happy rocking out to The Drive, probably the best radio station on the planet (although WWOZ here in New Orleans gives it a serious run for it’s money). Read the rest of this entry »

During the doldrums of summer, I found myself at home one weekday evening with nothing to do.  The Red Sox were not playing, I promised Glizz that I would not start Season 2 of The Wire until he returned from his law school sponsored vacation in Greece (a promise that I at least kept for the first 4 weeks of his 6 week excursion), and I had yet to buy the Grateful Dead Six pack for Rock Band.

Flipping around on the tube, I stumbled across the TBS original sitcom My Boys.  I figured I would give it a go.  All I knew going into my first viewing was that it is set in Chicago and filmed in HD.  Hitting one of these criteria is good enough for me to give something the old college try, so the fact that it got both was promising.  Besides, it prominently features Jim Gaffigan, so it can’t be that bad, right?

Right.  It’s really not that bad.  Under different circumstance, it may not have earned the “Record entire season” distinction on my DVR, but for some reason I was feeling charitable after my first viewing and gave it the go.  After watching one cleverly written, comfortably paced episode after another it dawned on me:  Sure, this show is not going to be the next Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (hell, I don’t even think it will be the next The Single Guy or Boston Common), but does that automatically qualify it as unwatchable?  An alleged film major, for example, may say “Yes, that does make it unwatchable.”  He may also say “Christ, man!  I figured you were recording it to be ironic!” Read the rest of this entry »