Attempting to reminisce

To whoever has been listening:

Now this idea of playing dead reminds me of the old Hollywood Western movies. But I don’t wanna talk about that today — not even a saloon shooting (tho admittedly that is tempting). I feel like writing an irresponsible story, whose plot is thin to nonexistent. Let it fail fast and then take a turn for the tedious. For all I want is to dump into a melting pot a bunch of my adolescent memories of consumer culture . . . reflect back the trash that I was raised on. Just to pass the time while I wait for a boat.

So the first thing that happens in today’s diary entry is that the corpse of the kingdom’s lost princess Zelda Fitzgerald washes up along Paumanok’s shore, because the drunken author has prayed to the sea, in the words of Whitman: “I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.” But it’s a local plumber who finds her, not the author. (The author falls offstage after getting everything started – the author should never be a part of any story.) Let us name this plumber “The Missing Link” because he’s heavily mustachioed. And let’s say that his double has escaped from the alternate dimension, and he looks identical to our protagonist except that he’s covered in thick fur from head to foot. So this evil twin attacks our hero by rolling wooden barrels at him from the top of his skyscraper, and the barrels are burning. But then our hero smashes each of the barrels with a hammer — either that or he leaps clear over them like they are hurdles.

Then I suppose we should have our hero battle the Chaos Dragon and win. And then he can discover he’s too late to rescue his love interest; for Princess Fitzgerald has been transferred to another dimension. This probably happened when The Missing Link’s shadow-self escaped from the Dark Tower of Childe Roland.

That’s it? The end? I guess so. I’m already annoyed with myself for starting down this path. I had such a simple goal, and I couldn’t even attain that.

What I thought I was doing here was combining elements from the 1986 video game The Legend of Zelda with the “Princess” from 1985’s Super Mario Bros. game, but placing the wife of native Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald in the titular role of the former game, and confounding her with the murdered heroine from Twin Peaks (1990–2017). All this seemed clever to me, but now that I’ve taken a break to do some lazy-research, I’ve learned that the creator of both the above games, Shigeru Miyamoto, actually took the name Zelda from that very same personage. So I just reinvented the wheel. And apparently Miyamoto and his team worked simultaneously on those two titles, Zelda and Mario, following a plan to collect as many ideas as possible and then sort them out into two antithetical projects, one that would play more like a board game, relatively calm and intellectual, while the other would be fast, wild, and visceral like a pinball machine. So my merging the material from these sources is like taking the heaven and earth from that first sentence in Genesis and smooshing them back into one single uncreated jumble. Quite the opposite of Maxwell’s demon. Neither creative nor interesting.

§

Was anything ever enjoyable about art? I think so. It’s hard to recall, now. Nothing was ever enjoyable about life, which is why I started caring about art in the first place. But now it seems that everything I once thought of as art has died out. Painting is part of two-dimensional reality, which the Internet swallowed up. Music got ruined by . . . I’m not sure what to say about music, but it seems unhealthy nowadays. Plays are no longer performed, and films have faded out. Sculpture . . .

No: the spirit that made so much of the world of art attractive to me is still alive, and we could invest it in the new forms. I’m just afraid to let go of the old forms.

No: “afraid” is not the right word. My aversion is more about taste than fear: I would rather not exchange a physical painting for a picture on a computer screen. Yet why? Is it truly only the assumed lack of longevity? Maybe if I were to part with my prejudice, I might find something compensatory in these newfangled gimmicks . . .

I’ve talked about this already; I don’t want to whine anymore.

But I also don’t want to try to pose as happy when I’m deeply and truly unhappy.

§

All these TV shows, the cartoons and sitcoms from my childhood, like the couple video games that I mentioned above – these products all were made by writers and artists who contributed plots, philosophies, characters, etc. . . . Where do all these ideas go, once the products are out-of-date?

We fly to the future and find some characters occupying the Skypad Apartments in Orbit City. They’re called The Jetsons. This family consists of a father, his housewife, their teenage daughter, one son, a robot maid, and a dog that speaks perfect American. Here’s a sentence from Wikipedia:

George Jetson’s work week consists of an hour a day, two days a week.

I like the ease of quoting Wikipedia. I can see why the kids do it nowadays, to finish all their college papers. Here’s another sentence – this one is from the entry for the Family Ties sitcom:

Much of the humor of the series focuses on the cultural divide during the 1980s when younger generations rejected the counterculture of the 1960s and embraced the materialism and conservative politics which came to define the 1980s.

Doesn’t it already tell us something deep about our society, our Western Way (I’m trying not to call it a civilization), that there IS such a divide, and that the general movement was from pro-love to pro-lucre?

OK, let’s go to war. Will boys play with dolls? Will parents buy their sons dolls? How can we sell ancient brutality to gentle youth?

. . . the word “doll” was never used by Hasbro, Inc. or anyone involved in the development or marketing of G.I. Joe. “Action figure” was the only acceptable term, and has since become the generic description for any poseable doll intended for boys. “America’s movable fighting man” is a registered trademark of Hasbro, and was prominently displayed on every boxed figure package.

Of all the G.I. Joe dolls that I bought, my favorites were:

• SNAKE EYES, because you couldn’t see his face (“he was designed to save Hasbro money in the paint application process, as his first figure was made of black plastic with no paint applied for details, and his head did not require any detail because of the mask”);
• ZARTAN, because his skin changed color (“it appeared beige in its natural state, but when exposed to sunlight, Zartan’s flesh became dark blue”);
• DESTRO, because you couldn’t see his face (“he wears a mask forged from beryllium steel” – in my childhood, I took this to mean that he had a solid silver head);
• AND THE HOODED COBRA COMMANDER, because you couldn’t see his face. (After purchasing this doll as a mail-away exclusive, curiosity got the best of me – using pliers, I managed to remove his iconic hood, which was made of semi-soft plastic: thus I discovered that, underneath, in lieu of a head or any visage, there was just a black knob.)

My own family consisted of one father, his housewife, two sons (my brother and me), and no maids or pets. (I exclude my sister from this account because she was born more than a decade later, by which time my childhood was in an advanced state of decomposition.) Every so often, we all would take a family trip to see our grandparents. And my granddad would hand us kids each a five-dollar bill, to prove that he loved us. This gift would be given to my brother Paul and me every time that we visited. Later in life, we learned that granddad would give the same gift to our cousins – our uncle’s two boys, who were the same age us – whenever they visited him, as well. Now the difference between my dad and uncle was this: My uncle induced his kids to deposit grandad’s gift-cash in the bank, whereas my brother and I were allowed to spend our money on whatever we liked. So, after every visit to granddad, Paul and I would always use our gift-cash to purchase a toy from the franchise called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, because each “action figure” cost exactly five U.S. dollars. So, after many years of grandfather visits, our cousins ended up with thousands in the bank earning interest, whereas my brother and I possessed a mountain of He-Man dolls. When my grandfather found out about this, he was furious: he determined that he would never give Paul and me any more gift-cash. This made us cry, which caused our grandmother to feel pity, so she begged our granddad to reverse his awful judgment, and he relented. Then we spent the new cash on more dolls. – Have I told you this story already? It’s hard to keep track of what I’ve confessed in this ongoing diary. Here’s another Wikipedia clip:

The blond muscular He-Man (alter ego of Prince Adam) is characterized by his superhuman strength. Along with his friends, he attempts to defend planet Eternia and the rest of the universe from a skull-faced, blue-skinned sorcerer named Skeletor.

The characters that I remember from this series, other than the main two listed above, are Mer-Man, “the ruler of Eternia’s undersea kingdom”; She-Ra, “the long lost twin sister of He-Man”; and Evil-Lyn, an “extremely intelligent supervillainess.” It’s also worth noting that “Planet Eternia’s inhabitants are plagued by the aftermath of the Great Wars, which devastated earlier civilizations.”

I wonder how you rate these marketplace myths against, say, the Theogony of Hesiod or sacred creation accounts like the Popol Vuh.

Now let me grab some quotes about GoBots:

Thousands of years ago, on planet GoBotron, there lived a race of human-like organic entities called GoBeings. Trouble broke out when a power-hungry group known as the Renegades arose and attacked the peaceful Guardians. When a sabotage operation inadvertently caused a gigantic asteroid to collide with GoBotron, the natural disasters that resulted pushed the GoBeings to the verge of extinction. However, they saved themselves by replacing parts of their own bodies with mechanical substitutes, even to the extent of swapping out their brains. Thus, the GoBeings became GoBots.

The origin stories of our toys seem to be trying to warn us about the dangers of warfare. Compare that last legend to the genesis of the Transformers, which franchise (if I’m not mistaken) appeared a year afterwards:

The heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons leave their metallic homeworld of Cybertron to search for new sources of energy to revitalize their war efforts. They end up crashlanding on Earth, where they remain entombed and offline for millions of years. Awakening in 1984, the Decepticons set about pillaging Earth’s energy sources, while the Autobots attempt to protect the new world.

All the foregoing fantasies represent only a fraction of the toys or shows familiar to me from childhood. Now that my brother Paul has a couple young kids of his own, I wonder how our junk culture is going to try to stupefy them. My niece is just three years old – although she likes at least one pop song, she hasn’t responded to any of these other types of branded products yet. But my nephew, who’s six, is already a big fan of Pokémon; so let me see what that’s about:

The original full name of the franchise is Pocket Monsters, which has been commonly abbreviated to Pokémon since its launch (with an acute accent over the ‘e’ to aid in pronunciation).

The franchise is set in a world in which humans coexist with creatures known as Pokémon, most of which are inspired by real-world animals or mythical entities based on folklore. For example, Pikachu are a yellow mouse-like species with lightning bolt-shaped tails that possess electrical abilities.

The player character takes the role of a Pokémon Trainer. . . .

I think this reference to a “player character” concerns the part of the franchise that is a collectible card game. I’m not sure whether the whole phenomenon is more of a sport or a show or a toy or a cult or what. And I don’t really care.

The Trainer has three primary goals: travel and explore the Pokémon world; discover and catch each Pokémon species in order to complete their Pokédex; and train a team of up to six Pokémon at a time and have them engage in Pokémon battles.

So at least it eventually leads to warfare and dominance.

I’m sorry that I stole so much material from Wikipedia in this entry. I promise that I’ll never try such a trick again. But this was a wee bit interesting for me; I got to think about some outdated stuff, and I got to learn about the appetite of the upcoming generation. Bye, for now.