THE DAY AFTER MONDAY is a once a week missive in which ‘80s through 90s hold-over Tim Blevins misses the point in all this pointlessness.
“Last Dog And Pony Show” isn’t available on Google Play. I have it on CD but that would involve hooking up the player. “Night Of The Comet” is streaming on Tubi, but that’s with commercial interruptions every 30 minutes. I downloaded the Marvel Unlimited app for reading old issues of “Dazzler”… unless those issues number past 12.. in which case I’ll have to dig out my own collection from the bottom of the closet. Ugh, these digital limitations that would have seen like conjurer’s magic as recently as 2009 sure are disproportionately frustrating.
It is magic though, this technology I’m relying on to get me through uncertain quarantine. My daily schedule’s been decimated with no set wake time, no train to catch and no over time to curse. Basically I’m here, at home, where the only thing on my daily planner is one cautious breath of air on the way to the mailbox. So this digital tether of texting, Tweeting and Old Grey Whistle Tests on YouTube is one of my few frayed connections to past normalcy.
And I guess that’s what I’m reaching for … the past. Old sitcoms, old X-Men issues, old movie soundtracks … these are the kinds of things I’m seeking out to remind me of a time before … well … before under a month ago. But its not just this pandemic that has urged me into nostalgia. I’ve been stewing in this soup for over two decades now … probably longer but I hadn’t known it was nostalgia yet.
I think it was about the year 2000 when I bought a VHS box set of 80s Transformers cartoons on Amazon. And it was the medium, the packaging and, ultimately, the delivery system that designated the show as a relic. I binged Transformers five school days a week for so much of my childhood. And for that half hour, that was enough. Would that type of programming work for me now? And I mean RIGHT now… when I’m equating all things pop culture as salvation. I’ve acquired digital collections and (far too many) digital subscriptions each as a means of gaining access. But was this all better when it was plotted by the grid work of a TV Guide?
Ask me that in the simpler time of earlier 2020 and my answer would have been “fully and definitely yes.”. I would have cried inter-web foul and populated these paragraphs with an alliterative rant of how I miss video stores and used record shops (even though I always bought CDs) and that something in pop culture extinguished the day I first mistyped “Alphatryon” as a username. The loss of Must See TV as Must Be Seen Right Now was the collective decimation of consumer society.
All that wording seems pretty petty now. Those routines and structures I was illustrating above aren’t currently accessible. Truthfully, some of them haven’t been for a while. A long while. Well before this Squarespace account. Weekend visits to thrift shops, waiting in front of the movie theater for opening day tickets, it was an outside world that I frequently traveled through, agoraphobia in hand.
Well, that’s not happening now. Not for a while. And I miss that. But, as much as I’d like to dedicate this space to ranting on the curated underground that was Hollywood Video, I need to acknowledge that I’d be ranting online. Digitally. Via this very medium I claimed asphyxiated my adolescence.
Its a petty circle, to be coming to this realization here. Digital, physical, they are all just mediums. Still, right now, as I search for anything to cling to, I might as well embrace the intangibility of my wireless connection. Medium, message, who effing cares. I mean, I do, because now is not the time to call into question the multiple pop culture podcasts I’m throwing myself into. But off mic, maybe I need to be just a little lax right now. Just let myself indulge.. .however it might be ... in some mind numbing distractions of light fair entertainment.
It betrays the “Pop Culture Matters” mentality of the syllabus I’ve never taught but one day might. But right now (well, the “now” after I post this) I need to let my pretensions down and accept that pop culture is capable of being less than scholarly. Less than art. That maybe, sometimes, pop culture can be petty entertainment that doesn’t need to be on display for any reason other than to be …watched in the moment. And that moment doesn’t need any other weight than the moment in which it was watched, read or however it was experienced. That’s the definition of escapism and, right now, all I need is a moment of escape.
Of course I type this as the series finale of Caroline in The City wraps up on Amazon, suggesting “Veronica’s Closet” as my next big binge.
-sigh-
Tim
Tim is Tim Blevins, co-host of 20TH CENTURY POP! and a few other upcoming podcasts. He ‘s currenty cursing the low number of Single Guy episodes illegally posted on Vimeo..
This week’s 20TH CENTURY POP! social distances all over the place as Bob and Tim take a look at the pop culture apocalypses of “Twelve Monkeys,” “Night Of The Comet” and some Kevin Costner movies … for some reason. Hear it Thursday at NAHPODS.COM, APPLE PODCASTS, STITCHER, SPOTIFY and other ANDROID DEVICES.
You can also check out Tim’s upcoming 5 day a week dive into the discography of the Replacements with the official SHOW TRAILER FOR WHAT’S THAT SONG?.
Talk to TIM BLEVINS on TWITTER @subcultist
See what he’s seeing on INSTAGRAM @subcultist
And subscribe to his podcasts at www.nahpods.com.