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summers of 69
Wednesday, June 18 2003
After seeing a quasi-non-sequitur mention of the band Polvo in a brief Salon.com review of Liz Phair's poppy new album, I remember it as a band that I'd completely forgotten about. I'd a couple of their songs on some mix tapes I'd recorded directly from WXJM (a Harrisonburg college radio station) back in the early 90s, and I thought I'd go check them out again on KaZaA. KaZaA is about as good an eternity as a band that obscure can hope to achieve. After downloading them, I immediately loved two Polvo songs: "Tragic Carpet Ride" and "Fractured (Like Chandeliers)". The guitars are crazy, occasionally sounding more like straining mattress springs than anything else, and the song structures themselves are the musical equivalent to constructing Fairfax-style condominiums within the confines of a medieval street plan while being attacked by UFOs hurling intergalactic humanitarian aid packages. I didn't like many of the songs until I cranked up the volume - they contain so much controlled chaos that you really have to crank it to hear it all.
I keep having ideas for website parodies, but I never make the time to actually create them. My latest idea is to take a cue from Jesse "the Maniacal Mormon" Helms and make a site advertising a computer that explodes the moment it downloads an MP3 using any file sharing software. Perhaps there's enough guilt among the great file-sharing unwashed that such a computer could hold its own as a niche product in the unregulated marketplace. An as-yet-unspoken downside for computers having this capacity is the potential for abuse by hackers. And as for the already panic-inducing blue screen of death - well - you get my point.
In the evening we watched a Netflix DVD called A Walk on the Moon - a movie about summer family fun at a Catskills resort. The summer, though, just happens to be 1969, the season man first walked on the moon and Jimi Hendrix played a trippy new (though not especially patriotic) cover of "the Star Spangled Banner." A bored housewife discovers the richness of an adolescence missed while her husband is back in the City fixing a flood of televisions that need to work before the lunar landing. Meanwhile her daughter is off discovering what it means to become a woman. And her son, a dopey little kid with a cowboy hat, is in the running for a Darwin Award, throwing rocks at a hornet's nest. Gretchen had seen the movie before and she loved it. We kept trying to figure out where in the Catskills it was taking place, but there just weren't enough clues.
I may have asked this question before, but when Brian Adams sings about the Summer of 69 - is he singing about 1969 - or he singing about some other year? I'm sure plenty of people have experienced summers of 69 as recently as 2002.
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