Because it’s Friday, and because I love you, here is a clip of The Ultimate Warrior on Arsenio Hall during both personalities’ respective heydays (brought to my attention by the tweeting of @jeskeets). Even as someone who could care less about wrestling, I can enjoy the resolute early 90s-ness of this video. Also, there’s nothing I enjoy more than a big slab Grade A USDA-approved crazy.
Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia
Parental Musicology
When I was a little kid, like 5 years old, my mom had this habit of asking me who was playing on the radio. Eventually I figured out that whenever she asked me this, the answer was invariably The Beatles. So she upped the ante by asking me which Beatle wrote the song.
“C’mon, you gotta know this is Paul!” she’d say. “Listen to all the different parts that are in it. It’s like a suite!”
I didn’t quite appreciate such nuances, the differences between Paul’s symphonic ambitions and John’s love of more traditional rock and roll. But to be fair, I was 5.
In this grand tradition, I often play a song for The Baby and ask her who it is. Not so much because I think she’ll know the answer, but because it’ll introduce her to stuff that I think is great. I have no illusions of turning her into a music snob at her young age, but I like putting her in a Cloud of Information, the idea being that at the very least, she’ll have a lot of information rattling around in her little brain and can one day do crossword puzzles with it.
Usually, the “instruction” is little more than me telling her who performs a particular song. Like the time Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” came on the car radio and I informed her of the responsible party. “That guy sings crazy!” she said. Yes, he does.
My dad did something very similar to me–unconsciously, I think. He liked to watch British comedy on PBS a lot, and I joined him on occasion. Much of the humor flew straight over my head for reasons of vocabulary, historical context, and foreignness. So I’d ask him to explain a joke to me if I didn’t get it, which he invariably would, even if there was no way on earth I should have understood it. I’d do the same thing with Mad Magazine Super Specials, which often contained reprints from 10-15 years earlier, lampooning people and movies from before I was born. That’s how I could come up with a good zinger about Edward Heath or Spiro Agnew by age 8.
Recently, we were driving home from somewhere and had just parked the car. The radio was playing Frank Sinatra’s version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” So I tried to give The Baby a two-tiered, family-themed music lesson. I explained that this was one of Nanny’s (my mom’s) favorite songs, since she was a big fan of Cole Porter. And I also explained that the guy singing it was my Nanny’s (her great-grandmother’s) favorite singer. It was an attempt to both school on what she was hearing and give her some familial context for why the song struck a chord with me.
From the backseat, she gave me this puzzled look. “I like rock and roll music,” she said, simply, emphatically.
Long pause. “Yeah, I like it, too,” I said, and we went home. There’s plenty of time for more nuanced lessons.
Tales of Punching from the Old Country
I wish my father were still with us on a day like today, because only he could simultaneously express pride and shame in being Irish.
The pride was the same as that of any other person of Celtic heritage. The shame was borne more of his experiences in Ireland as a young’un, and his disgust at how Irishness is “celebrated” in America. He lived in Ireland until he was 12, including a few very unhappy years when his father moved to New York for work and had to leave his family behind while he saved enough money to send for them.
One of the first American events he ever went to was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Back in Ireland, this was still a solemn, nationalistic, deeply religious occasion. In New York, he saw mounted police teetering and puking from atop their steeds. It was a culture shock, to say the least.
As an adult, he had little good to say about Ireland or the Irish. He noted with bitterness that every one of its best writers had to leave the country (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde), and the few who didn’t fell in line with disastrously romantic notions of self-destruction (Brendan Behan). He traveled all over the world for business,* to India, ex-Soviet republics, Indonesia, and a million other remote locations. But the only place I heard him express displeasure at having to visit was Ireland.
* What kind of business? Very good question. Based on that curious itinerary, and the fact that each one of them experienced strife immediately before or after he arrived, I have my suspicions.
And yet, he would often declare his pride, ways both voiced and unvoiced. His small library contained almost nothing but Irish books, including an annotated version of Dubliners. He once told me he turned down a consulting gig with Reuters because “they’re a British company!” (The from the man responsible for my love of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.)
Biggest sign of all: he never became an American citizen. This was partially due to his inherent laziness, but it also required him to get his green card validated every few years, which in turn required a lengthy, bureaucratic-nightmare-filled trip to the Irish consulate.
The stories from his youth were told for yucks, but inevitably involved violence or crushing disappointment, or both. Like the story I regaled a crowd with earlier this week. (If you missed it, here’s a variation on the theme.) Or the time his Uncle Paddy, a farmer, was kicked in the chest by a cow and retaliated by delivering a swift punch to the side of Bessie’s head. The cow let out a bovine moan of pain and keeled over, knocked out cold.
But my favorite is the one that best encapsulates his time in Ireland, his view of the place, and maybe Ireland as a whole.