Has it really been a year?

Completely unrelated to this post, or, clickbait: Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn

I just came to the realization that this blog started one year ago next month. In that year, our kids have grown from six to eighteen months old. While raising the Wonder Twins, my wife and I have grown a year older, but likely not any wiser, just more exhausted, frazzled, and incoherent. That and the header image remind me: anyone want to babysit for us so I can see Suicide Squad this summer? Anyway, in the last year I've also started writing for a website, Sequart, which has been terrifically fulfilling and fun. I fear it's taken what little time I have to write away from this blog, though, and for that I'm sorry. I had intended to fill this space with a mixture of things that mattered to me: the occasional personal reflection on my life, my family, and even my struggles and anxieties, along with more lighthearted pieces on pop culture and it's influence and impact on us. Well, the latter subject matter has kind of taken over this blog, mostly because it's on my mind a lot due to the articles that I'm writing for Sequart. Recently I received a review copy from St. Martin's Press for the essay collection Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life and a review copy of the buzz-worthy new novel A Hundred Thousand Worlds is on its way to me from Viking Press/Penguin Books. This means that when I write again soon, it will more than likely be in the form of reviews of these books, hopefully to finding a home at Sequart. I've realized that writing about pop culture that helps shape us is just as personal as writing about a moment from our youth that left an equally strong impression on us. It's all part of what makes up our personalities, our souls.

There's also a bit of self-preservation at work when I write what these personal reflections from a pop cultural obsessive. It's not that it's easier to write about myself while in theory writing about something else, a work of some sort, but it does provide just the slightest mask that I can still use to hide behind, just a bit. Old introverted ways die hard, or in fact never actually die, they just take brief vacations but always return home. Late last year I wrote about a summer during college, one particularly eventful time in my young life that, unbeknownst to me then, was a turning point in my life. I can look back on that summer today and realize that's when I began accelerating my growth into the person that I am now. That was a really hard piece to write. It was dredging up emotions and memories I hadn't thought of in ages. They were almost universally good memories, but it's still hard to look back at your younger self and see who you were, warts and all, on full display. But I want to try it again someday, and this blog is the spot where I'll do that.

So, thanks for reading me here and elsewhere over the last year, and for understanding that blogging isn't about over-sharing, or complaining, or venting, but instead is about working things out one word at a time in order to make some sort of meaning out of the absurdity of this thing we call life.

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Blowing in the Wind: Marilyn Monroe and That Iconic White Dress

This month marks sixty-five years since one of the most iconic moments in twentieth-century popular culture: Marilyn Monroe’s angelic white dress being blown sky high by wind rushing up from a subway grate beneath her feet in the film The Seven Year Itch . Billy Wilder shot multiple takes, while Sam Shaw snapped photo after photo for what had to be the biggest publicity stunt ever staged at the time. Marilyn wore two pairs of underwear for the shot, yet, as noted in Lois Banner's critical biography Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (2012), "a dark blotch of pubic hair" remained visible to the 100 male photographers and over 1,500 male spectators, all of whom crowded eagerly around the set to gawk and drool. Due to strict 1950s movie censorship laws, photos had to be doctored to white out the offending blotch, but those in attendance saw it, over and over, shot after shot. Marilyn's husband at the time, the extremely old fashioned Joe DiMaggio, stormed off th

All I Want For Christmas: Phoebe Cates's Monologue in Gremlins

Joe Dante's 1980s classic Gremlins will always be a subversive Christmas favorite. From Spike exploding in the microwave to Mrs. Daigle's "stairlift to hell", the movie is packed with deliciously transgressive moments that turn the holly jolly season right on its ear. None are more memorable, though, than Phoebe Cates delivering her legendary "worst thing that ever happened to me on Christmas" monologue. It's a jaw-dropping, tour-de-force moment, a truly horrific story that's also one of the most darkly comic moments in Christmas movie history. Cates really shines during this scene. There's no denying just how seminal that scene of hers in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was for a generation of young people, but her speech in Gremlins is equally important and a wonderful showcase for her serious and comedic acting skills. Here's the speech, in its entirety. No Christmas season is complete without at least one viewing

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This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. Very few television series in the 1990s were as polarizing as Married...with Children . People either loved it or they loathed it. TV critics and good upstanding Catholic families like mine fell into the latter category. Soon after it debuted during my first year of junior high in 1987 (not quite the '90s, but on the brink), my parents made it clear that we would not be watching. I believe the words they used were "vulgar," "unfunny," and, one of their perennial favorites, "risque." Of course, this meant it immediately took on a prurient appeal for me. Parents can never win, honestly. Kelly Bundy—the talented Christina Applegate, who never gets enough credit for elevating the blonde airhead trope into an art form—only further piqued my interest. She was like the girls in school with the absurdly voluminous hair and ridiculously sh

"That girl looks just like Pat Benatar"

Linda, that girl looks just like Pat Benatar. I know. Wait, there are three girls here at Ridgemont who have cultivated the Pat Benatar look. I was just a kid when Fast Times at Ridgemont High opened in 1982. Still though, even at the tender young age of seven, I knew who Pat Benatar was, because a.) her music was all over the radio and even then I recognized the utter awesomeness of her vocal talent in songs like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", and b.) some of the older girls around town were obviously cribbing their looks—clothes, hair, makeup, strut—from Benatar's own style. Benatar was ubiquitous. So, when I see or hear vintage-era Benatar now, I think of Fast Times , but mostly I remember that ubiquity—of both the performer and her legion of young imitators. I know it's not true, but when I recollect those years I swear every older girl looked like either Benatar, Juice Newton, or Joan Jett. It's easy to forget, years later, that

Misspent Youth: Joanne Whalley

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Misspent Youth: Randi Brooks

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Margot Kidder and the Childhood Crush That Will Never Die

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It Came From the '90s: My Secret Crush on The Nanny

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"Opium Wars" by Zoe Lund

She wants there to be more of her. More space taken by her body, More decibels conquered by her voice, More time by her wakefulness, More equations by her addition. She wants more, I want less. Her blade is rusty, musty, sweaty and vain. I like it clean and sharp and dark-bright. She traffics in surplus, I bare my essentials. Her world is elastic but brittle. Mine is bony but moonlit. Hers flows, she ebbs. Mine ebbs, I flow. She dies in life, I live in death. —Zoe Lund, “Opium Wars”

Misspent Youth: Morgan Fairchild

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