Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

T R E 4 5 O N

You are here: Home / Medium Cool / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Tell Us A Story

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Tell Us A Story

by | 278 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Tonight we kick off Episode 7 of the weekly Guest Post series: Medium Cool with BGinCHI.

In case you missed the introduction to the series:  Culture as a Hedge Against this Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We’re Living In

You can find the whole series here:  Medium Cool with BGinCHI

Tonight’s Topic:  Tell Us A Story

Anyone (older than BG) who grew up around Chicago will recognize this.  It’s what I thought of immediately when BG shared his topic for tonight.

Take it away, BG!

In this week’s Medium Cool, we want to know what cultural object or idea saved your life. Or, less dramatically, influenced your life in such a way that it was never the same again.

It could be a book, song, a film, a painting, a photograph, a building, a night at the opera, or anything that tells us a little story about how, without art (to paraphrase Nietzsche), life would be a mistake.

Reader Interactions

278Comments

  1. 1.

    raven

    Some of us Chicagoan’s were “abroad” at that time. Now, Two Ton Baker and “laugh your troubles away at Riverview”..

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    I have quite a few of these moments because, given where, and under what circumstances, I grew up, I should probably be working at the Subaru factory outside town. I’m extremely fortunate to be doing what I do and have the life I have, and I owe it all to books and reading and ideas.

    Here’s one moment:

    In summer of 1992 I was at the end of my first year of a PhD program in Toronto. I couldn’t legally work, so I subletted my apt and moved to Charlottesville, VA, where I lived in a farmhouse with two friends and their array of pets. I tended bar and waited tables.

    The previous semester I’d taken an amazing English Dept seminar on Lacan, and in it I’d volunteered to do a presentation on his seminar on Hamlet. I worked my ass off on it. I was in an inter-disciplinary PhD program, and we didn’t have teaching positions of our own. We had to try to get them in other depts. These were VERY hard to get.

    One afternoon, at the end of my Sunday brunch shift behind the bar at The Virginian, the phone rang and it was my mother. She said the English Dept was trying to track me down and couldn’t find me anywhere, as they wanted to offer me a position as a Shakespeare TA for the coming year. I had to call the next day or I wouldn’t get it. I remember holding the receiver out and literally looking at it in disbelief.

    So I called, and they offered, and I accepted, and that was the beginning of my career as a Shakespeare Prof.

    Truth be told, I didn’t know shit about it. I’d read Hamlet 20 times for my presentation, but my BA and MA were in Political Philosophy. Turns out someone had quit their program and at the last meeting where they had to staff up, they had no one to TA that course, and so my Lacan prof raised his hand and said, “I have just the guy for you.”

    I’ve learned a lot since then and by indirections found a lot of directions out.

  3. 3.

    pamelabrown53

    Does anyone have a single cultural touchstone that changed the course of their lives?

    For me it was cumulative: different art forms and philosophies that intertwined and reinforced one another while I was navigating my way from young adult to adult.

    Probably took too long judging from my decisions and mistakes.

  4. 4.

    Miss Bianca

    12 years old, transferred from a public school where I was more or less benignly ignored to a private school where I immediately became the butt of all the Kool Kidz’s cruel humor. The saving grace? Discovery of an existing band of misfit toys I became fast friends with. Our common language, our patois, our assurance that there was a big, weird, wide, wonderful world out there beyond Grosse Pointe?

    Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Weekly on Channel 56. Then Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then Life of Brian, then Jabberwocky, then Time Bandits. Warped my tender young mind beyond recall, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  5. 5.

    NotMax

    As the graffito relates, Nietzsche is pietzsche.

    :)

    Without taking the time to rummage through the memory box (which might as well be made of Swiss cheese) I’d have to go with the original Star Trek.

    On the shallow side, perhaps, but it is what it is.

  6. 6.

    raven

    Cultural object? I posted this earlier this week but I’ll do it again. In “Whistle and Fish” John Prine talks about being afraid of bees. He’s talking about his first job at “Skips Fiesta” at 1st and North in Maywood (West side of Chicago). This joint was part of the fabric of every gear head who grew up in Chicago in the 60’s along with Santa Fe Speedway, Mr Norms Dodge/Chrysler and US 30 Dragstrip in Indiana. I worked in gas stations in Villa Park in those days and my clearest memory is opening Bill and Walts Texaco on Roosevelt Road and switched on the radio to the news of Richard Speck and 7 nurses.

  9. 9.

    jackmac

    Lifelong Chicagoan here with absolutely no awareness or memory of this show.  Besides, in 1969 (the year of this episode), I was a smug 13-year-old who had moved on from kids’ TV. It was a much better year to follow baseball, at least until the Cubs collapsed in September.

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    @Miss Bianca: I became an Anglophile because of Brit novels and TV, though I’m not even sure I knew it was happening to me.

    Music too: once I heard Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, I was lost.

  12. 12.

    raven

    @jackmac: I came home September 3, 69 and went right down to the U of I with 100 hits or organic mesc I picked up in San Francisco when I mustered out. Seeing Santana at the Fillmore West was life changing.

  13. 13.

    Miss Bianca

    @BGinCHI: Shakespeare too, I have to add. Started reading him on my own at age ten or so. Fueled my determination to go into theater.

    Were you at the University of Toronto? I desperately wanted to go to the University of Toronto to do a PhD in medieval history after seeing a troupe of actors from the UT known as the PLS – Poculi Ludique Societas – who did absolutely brilliant productions of medieval plays. Alas, ’twas not to be, but my drama program got to be involved in a couple big productions of the English medieval cycle dramas back in the 80s that they sponsored. That changed my life, too!

  16. 16.

    BGinCHI

    @Miss Bianca: Social & Political Thought at York University. Though I took classes at U of T as well, and used their library a lot.

    SPT had the smartest students of any program I’ve ever attended, by a stretch, and my actual PhD (into which I transferred, in the US), was top-notch.

  17. 17.

    Mary G

    I was nine or ten and my dad was in year three or four of fighting cancer and I was often left alone because the kindly neighbor my mom left me with was a raging alcoholic, so I read a lot. I had finished the children’s section of the tiny library in town, so I started sneaking into the adult section. I thought I was being very sneaky and nonchalant, but the librarian noticed and told me to check out P.G. Wodehouse and James Thurber. Those books saved my life.

  19. 19.

    debbie

    Cutural objects? No, more like moments: The moment I heard Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic on headphones; the moment I saw cops beating up kids on t.v. during the 1968 Democratic convention; the moment I heard Muddy Waters playing live; the moment I heard Patti Smith’s Gloria; the moment someone handed me a paperback copy of Ironweed; and on and on. Many moments that made me me, for better or for worse. Those are the good moments; I think if I could have been more mindful of the bad moments, I might not have repeated them like I did.

  21. 21.

    BGinCHI

    @Mary G: I was also going to write about the public library.

    What would I have done without that place? Like Lisa Simpson, the old lady librarians all knew my name. I owe that place a BIG debt.

  23. 23.

    raven

    @debbie: Ha, I sat in there barracks at Ft Lewis waiting to ship to Vietnam and watched the convention. “We’re finally on our own” came early for me.

  24. 24.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    Good god. I remember being dragged to one by my boyfriend. “A Dirty Western.” The musical score was the best part. The rest was ridiculous.

  25. 25.

    BGinCHI

    @debbie: Perfect. Thank you.

    I’ve been thinking of moments just like that during the pandemic, as it feels like the normal flow of life has stopped and offered us an opportunity to reckon with things.

  26. 26.

    debbie

    @raven:

    What a nightmare that must have been. By the end of that year, I and my friends had adopted “Abandon all hope ye who enter” as our motto.

  27. 27.

    MomSense

    I’m a PK and moved around a lot growing up.  My grandmother was a pianist and my mom was a violinist.  My mom played in symphonies, pit orchestras, and even in commercials.  I grew up going to everything and watching from backstage.  I think that’s why I became a dancer.

  29. 29.

    debbie

    @BGinCHI:

    Yep, stopped dead. I had the thought while out walking this afternoon checking out spring that I likely wouldn’t live to see the world return to some semblance of order.

    I really know how to cheer me up!?

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    I have zero memory of this show (grew up on the North Shore) but I was an early reader who disliked being “read to,” so it may just be something I skipped. Now, show me a few episodes of “Zoom” …

    My idea for an author blog is along the lines of “Pop Culture that Changed My Life,” but with a snappier title. For this exercise, I’ll go with a syndicated radio show: “London Calling,” featuring all of the British hits of the 1980s. That’s where I got my fix of everything that wasn’t being played on American pop radio yet like The Smiths, The Cure, etc.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    “Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.”
      – Bertrand Russell

    ;)

    @Mary G

    Yeah, the Freddy the Pig books the librarians habitually shoved at me take one only so far.

    ;)

    Would furtively make my way to other parts of the library and end up taking out books by Aldous Huxley and Zola; also of plays by Chekhov. (Weird kidlet.)

  38. 38.

    Miss Bianca

    @NotMax: Hey, I LOVED Freddy the Pig! Actually, that was a pretty life-changing moment for me, the time I found “Freddy and the Popinjay” when I was nine years old, nestled among the British military history books in my father’s library. No idea what it was doing there, but I finally pulled it one day because the title intrigued me.

    The rest, as they say, is history – just not British military history.

  39. 39.

    prostratedragon

    The Storyteller! I remember him. He came from stillness, and at the end of the story returned to stillness. That always haunted me.

     

    Emmendation: I think I remember the earlier, WGN edition of the show. In 1969 I was entering college, and would have been glad it was still around for the younger kids.

  40. 40.

    oatler.

    From the Chicago area, Studs Terkel’s and Jean Shepard’s radio shows. We knew them and loved  them.

  41. 41.

    pamelabrown53

    @BGinCHI:

    Gottcha and thanks for replying,

    Don’t know how “life changing” but influencing: attending Mizzou in mid-seventies, I met a woman at a local “Bouche Burger” establishment who later married a male biology student who was a great friend of mine. Serendipity.

    We shared many hours of drinking to Jonie Mitchell and relating that to feminism, existentialism and raucous, sometimes silly laughter.

    20 years later, savoring her, Vanessa Redgrave and the Bouche Burgers, I left the straight life!

    Does that count?!

     

     

    @BGinCHI:

  43. 43.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I remember my first (and only) porn movie.  We grew up watching Flash Gordon, so when the movie came out when I was grown up, that was a big deal.

    But there was also Flesh Gordon, which was an X-rated version of Flash Gordon.  So my sister and I and her husband and the guy I was dating all went to see Flesh Gordon on a lark.

    They handed everyone a towel as we walked in the door (eeeew!).

    If you ever watched Flash Gordon, you know that “They’ve got Dale!” was a frequent refrain, because she was often taken and had to be rescued.  At one point, they used that line in the movie, and my date shouted out “Everybody’s had Dale!”

    Which we thought was pretty funny.  Did I mention you could also drink alcohol at that theater?

  46. 46.

    Eric S.

    I do not know the TV show pictured. I was born in 1971 in downstate IL (Quincy). My parents moved to the west suburbs (Woodridge) in 1979.

    I think my answer to this week’s question is Star Wars. Cliche, I know, but it’s been a touchstone throughout my life. Dad took me to see the original in 1977. It was mind blowing to my 6/7 year old mind. I have had a life long love affair with Sci-Fi ever since. My brother and I had so many of the toys it was ridiculous.

    I’ll even say the prequels gave me another realization. The things I loved as a kid didn’t have to hold up in adulthood but I could still love what I did in my childhood.

  47. 47.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Oh gawd, that triggered a recollection. Wasn’t a kids show aired in the NYC area back when which didn’t have hokey ads for Freedomland amusement park in the Bronx and/or Palisades Park in New Joisey.

  49. 49.

    Scout211

    When television was first broadcast “in living color.”

    When Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles.

    ETA: The first season of Saturday Night Live

  52. 52.

    Redshift

    One thing that made a big difference in my life at one point was the book “I’m Okay, You’re Okay,” about Transactional Analysis. It was when I was a teenager, going through stuff that was no worse than most teenagers, but like most teenagers, I was miserable. It really made a lot of sense to me and helped me get on a more even keel. I haven’t read it again in decades, and it’s not something I live my life by, but it was exactly what I needed right then.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @BGinCHI:

    The one Shakespeare Guy I think I’ve met is Miles Parks Grier from Queens College/SUNY. I was a random idiot at a symposium he presented at, and I had to miss his presentation because we had to take our dying cat to an emergency vet appointment.

    I’m still convinced that a character in “A Discovery of Witches” is based on him. I can’t entirely explain it, but the character just feels like him, and it’s not just because they’re both Black.

  54. 54.

    middlelee

    The Fires of Spring, Michenor. Published in 1949 and I probably read in my late teens, 1958-1959. So much excitement about what’s to come, about possibilities.
    Much later, Robertson Davies Deptford Trilogy, starting with Fifth Business. Books so full of people who stretched, learned, enjoyed the hell out of living. And overcame their beginnings, and got even, years later. I think I read most of his fiction eventually.
    I started reading at about age five. My mother said it was in desperation because she was always reading. She let me read whatever I wanted, assuming correctly that what was too old for me would go over my ahead and not be a bad influence. The whole family read whenever possible. Meals were quiet because we were all reading. I read biographies, novels, comic books, true confessions, non-fiction about everything, everything except The Great Books. At age 70 I realized I was never going to read them and furthermore, I didn’t need to.
    For 80 years books have allowed me to visit the lives and worlds of people all over the world, in many centuries. They have encouraged, explained, sustained. Laughter, tears, joy. Books never fail me. I no longer feel compelled to finish every book I start reading. At this point, life really is too short.

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    @oatler.

    Brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palm digitally awarded you for mention of Shep. Weeknight ritual, broadcast live from a studio at WOR. Which than had only the single W in its call sign.

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    My father really wanted me to see Amercan Graffiti when it was first in the theaters.  I was about 10.  We walked the few blocks to the uniplex in State Street in Geneva and found that its run had ended the night before.  There was a new movie playing, so my dad said what the fuck and we got tickets.  Neither of us knew any thing about the movie, so we got popcorn and sodas then sat down to watch.  The movie was Young Frankenstein.

  57. 57.

    Mnemosyne

    @Eric S.:

    I like to remind people that the first competent Action Heroine was Princess Leia. Without her, we wouldn’t have characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

    People today just don’t get how hilarious and groundbreaking it was when she realized that her two “rescuers” didn’t know what they were doing and shot out the door to the garbage chute herself. ?

  59. 59.

    BGinCHI

    @Scout211: Vivid memory of the first time I ever watched an SNL skit.

    It was Belushi doing Joe Cocker. I was 10, watched it with my dad (a rare thing), and I thought it was shocking because I had no idea who Joe Cocker was or what a parody was (at least that kind).

  60. 60.

    Eric S.

    @raven: I remember hearing those names. My father is a huge high school basketball fan. Illinois high school basketball tournament lays (a) claim to being the original March Madness.

  63. 63.

    BGinCHI

    @middlelee: Thank you for this.

    A life in books is a rich life indeed. I’ve been lucky to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.

  64. 64.

    raven

    @Eric S.: Oh yea, my old man used to come down to C-U and we would go to every game. That’s when the entire sweet 16 was played there and there was one class. I used to fish over in Hamilton/Keokuk back in the day too.

  67. 67.

    piratedan

    well life turns on moments doesn’t it?

    in regards to my life trajectory, I think the seminal one for me was that I was 10 and with both of my parents being employed by the former corporate giant (whose initials stood for I’ve Been Moved), I was in my 3rd school of my young life when in independent studies, a teacher noted the book I was reading… HG Wells’ War of the Worlds… which for most 10 year olds I guess was a bit of a stretch.  He asked me if I was enjoying the book and to give a synopsis of the plot, which I did and my grasp of the story must have impressed him.  The next day, my parents got word to show up to school.

    they were informed that the school had reviewed my past record of academic achievement and that somehow no one had ever noted it before but it would be in my best interests to place me in the accelerated program.

    so school went from boring to challenging and challenging begat opportunity to be exposed to more opportunity…  so in many ways, my life changed because of one person, who noted a quiet student reading something that was generally something that not all 10 year olds would be reading, so its hard to say which had more impact, the teacher or the book, but I prefer to think of them as a pair, by themselves they were helpful, together, their effect was amplified.

  68. 68.

    BGinCHI

    @Omnes Omnibus: I remember the first time I saw it. I didn’t get it. I’d loved Blazing Saddles, but YF’s humor was doing something I couldn’t really grasp.

    Cool your dad took you to stuff like that. I’m fearless that way with my kid, too.

  69. 69.

    Miss Bianca

    @BGinCHI: What kills me now is that the brilliant seasons of SNL with Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radnor, et al. were current at the same time as I was indulging my Monty Python grand pash, but I was such a snob and refused to watch it – because SNL was what all the self-proclaimed Kool Kidz were watching and quoting, so in my teenage contrarianism I figured it had to be shit. I have frequently kicked myself in retrospect for missing out on that SNL golden era in real time.

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Omnes Omnibus: Around the same time, I got The Complete Sherlock Holmes for Christmas and the following summer my dad suggested that I might enjoy Scaramouche by Sabatini.  I’ve read many “better” things since then, but they aren’t really the same, are they?

    Also, I had completely forgotten The Storyteller until now.

  72. 72.

    A Ghost to Most

    1971 I had been tossing the concept of deities back and forth, visiting different “houses of worship”, and so forth.

    My brother had Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, and I listened to that album many times. It assured me that they are all full of shit. I’ve never wavered since.

  73. 73.

    Eric S.

    @Mnemosyne: I was far too young to recognize any cultural significance of that at the time. Thinking about it now does make me smile.

  75. 75.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Mnemosyne:

    I like to remind people that the first competent Action Heroine was Princess Leia. Without her, we wouldn’t have characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

    Did someone say Buffy The Vampire Slayer?

    Obligatory

    Fuck off autoincorrect!

  76. 76.

    WaterGirl

    @prostratedragon: Me, too.  Everything you said, how he started out still.

    You know, I thought it was on WGN, aka Channel 9, but when I went searching for it, this was what I found.

    So maybe there was an earlier version.  In 1969 I was way too old to be watching that.

  78. 78.

    raven

    @Eric S.: Here’s a book for you or him.

     
    Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL IN ILLINOIS
     

    Far from the jaded professionals, the stories in Taylor Bell’s Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe are of hungry young men playing their hearts out, where high-tops and high hopes inspire “hoop dreams” from Peoria to Pinckneyville, and Champaign to Chicago. Bell, a life-long fan and authority on high school basketball in Illinois, brings together for the first time the stories of the great players, teams, and coaches from the 1940s through the 1990s.

    The book is titled for four players who reflect the unique quality of high school basketball, and whose first names are enough to trigger memories in fans who love the sport — Sweet Charlie Brown, Dike Eddleman, Cazzie Russell, and Bobby Joe Mason. Bell offers exciting accounts of their exploits, told with a journalistic flair.

     

    My old man was a high school coach at Benton, Evanston and North Chicago before we moved to LA in the late 50’s.

  82. 82.

    Redshift

    @Miss Bianca: I was lucky, I stumbled across it (and Python at the same time) because I had started staying up late as a teenager and watching whatever I found that seemed good. I saw the first episode of SNL when it was broadcast, before anyone else could influence my opinion.

    It was like nothing else.

  85. 85.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @BGinCHI: I missed fully half of the jokes, but the next morning my dad was still in tears trying to explain it to my mom.

  86. 86.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Oh, I got to Sherlock Holmes long before I got to Sabatini – courtesy of a Reader’s Digest children’s omnibus, of all things, that included “The Speckled Band”, the first Holmes story I ever read and consequently still one of my favorites.

    But I did stumble on The Three Musketeers by myself around age 12, so Dumas was a pretty constant companion and paved the way for Sabatini and John Buchan later, both of whom were authors my father loved and introduced me to. Captain Blood was my first, and still my favorite; Scaramouche would be next.

  88. 88.

    jeffreyw

    Forbidden Planet.  I was six or seven and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.  I have no idea why my parents took us to see it.  We went to the local theater in Smalltown, Illinois.  I loved me some Robie the Robot.  The Id monster gave me nightmares for months.  Ray guns, flying saucers!

  90. 90.

    middlelee

    @BGinCHI: OT slightly but I just read Miama Blues, by Charles Willeford yesterday.  I’m pretty certain you recommend Willeford in a previous Medium Cool.  I enjoyed it and I wonder if Carl Hiassen  was influenced by him.  I love, love, love Hiassen’s books.

  91. 91.

    HinTN

    The summer of my junior year in high school I went to a program at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, IN.  The study subject was “Power”. The curriculum began with the American Revolution and ended up on the South Side of Chicago with the Black Panthers’ Operation Breadbasket. I heard the Reverend Jesse Jackson speak and this white bread boy was changed. Also that summer I met a Japanese American family that lived in Dyer, IN. The first time our classmate brought me home his (war-bride) mom fixed fried chicken (because she knew I was from the South) with rice and gravy. The gravy was just like mama made but the rice was sticky Japanese style. So good! I’ve stayed lifelong friends with those folks. Also went to the  Maywood home of a Polish girl in our class. Mama Kilpinski was a force of nature and treated us like royalty. Went to The Dunes and smoked pot for the first time. Discovered FM radio. Dayummmmm. Yeah, that summer changed me.

    ETA: Africa Brass turned this rock and roller into a big jazz fsm.

  93. 93.

    MomSense

    @raven:

    My dad was the CO advisor for Kent State.  The campus ministry group he started morphed into the anti – war movement there.  The SDS met in our basement.  My grandmother made snacks for the meetings.

    When we left we went to TX where my parents organized to desegregate the local schools.  We were shot at one morning.  My mom was 8 months pregnant at the time.  We moved back east after that.

  94. 94.

    John Revolta

    I remember that guy! But I never saw him in color……………he was on before we had a color set.

    It’s hard to believe he was still on in 1969, I don’t remember him being on that late. Could the date be wrong on the clapboard? Checking……….hmm, says at the site that it was on from 58-61 and again from 66-69. I’m willing to bet that the later show was rebroadcasts of the original. Nothing about that production seems like 1969 to me

    ETA: It says this episode was recorded Feb 1969, but it also says that it was one of WTTW’s first color shows? That definitely doesn’t add up.

  95. 95.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Would even toss in Beverly Garland as Pat “Casey” Jones in the late 50s series Decoy. Not chockablock with action but golly gee whillikers she was super competent.

  96. 96.

    Miss Bianca

    @mrmoshpotato: Oh, Christ, I’d forgotten how fucking funny that was.

    And speaking of my cultural snobbery, it took me years to watch TV series Buffy, because I couldn’t imagine it being better than the movie! Was I ever wrong about that!

    But the movie started me down the path of Whedon-stanning, for sure!

  98. 98.

    zhena gogolia

    David Magarshack’s translation of Gogol stories, checked out of the Southwest High School Library in KCMO when I was 12 or 13.

  99. 99.

    Mnemosyne

    @Eric S.:

    Trust me, the girls around your age noticed it because we finally got to DO THINGS when groups of kids would play. It was way harder for the boys to keep saying that we had to sit by and wait to be rescued since we could point out that Princess Leia helped rescue herself, so we should get to run around and pretend to shoot stuff, too.

  104. 104.

    BGinCHI

    @middlelee: Probably. I love his books.

    Best thing about them is how little attention they draw to themselves. Seemingly effortless writing.

    Glad you enjoyed!

    ETA: Try Bill Beverly’s novel Dodgers. SO GREAT.

  107. 107.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @BGinCHI: Well, on Saturday mornings, we would watch cartoons and then read for a while before going out and doing things.  I was lucky in that my parents were too broke for babysitters and too young to sit at home in the Chicago area in the ’60s and early ’70s.  I went where they did.  Museums, galleries, classes, protests.  Someone would probably call child services today, but look how well I turned out…  Wait, never mind.

  108. 108.

    BGinCHI

    @HinTN: Amazing.

    All at little ol’ St Jo!

    Just goes to show how much goes on even at little schools like that.

  109. 109.

    trollhattan

    One teevee show from my younger-than-young youth stands apart: The Twilight Zone. It perplexed, it challenged, it thrilled, it inspired one’s imagination, it scared little kids to the point of not sleeping well for days. The Shatner episode? Scary enough for you?

    Live events: JFK assassination. Alan Shepard. Beatles on Sullivan.

    Later, SNL watch parties were indelible events. The inmates were finally in charge of (a small part) of the asylum. We knew something had changed, what might follow? The harvest included Twin Peaks. Peewee’s Playhouse (at drunken brunches, on account of being broadcast in the a.m.). Hill Street. Cheers. Miami Vice.

    Also owe a big debt to the Brits: Avengers, Danger (Secret Agent) Man/Prisoner, Monty Python, Dr. Who, The Singing Detective.

    Munich Olympics on the dorm teevee. A year later, the Watergate hearings.

    That’s more than one.

  111. 111.

    BGinCHI

    @Omnes Omnibus: That’s how we’re raising our kid. When there’s an event or party, we just take him. He’s been to protests and all kinds of things.

  112. 112.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Ooh, St. Martin’s Summer – I don’t have that one, but I do have a (battered, hence non-collectible) first edition of The Trampling of the Lilies (1906! Another French Revolution-set one, good but not nearly as good as Scaramouche), and The Snare, the plot of which I have always wanted to steal and repurpose.

    Well, now that shelter-in-place is fully in effect here in CO, this might be the time for that particular exercise!

  114. 114.

    SFBayAreaGal

    One of my life changing moments for me, 6th grade, music appreciation class. Mr Knight had written on the chalkboard:

    Martin Luther King Jr.

    He then told us what happened and who he was.

  117. 117.

    trollhattan

    @jeffreyw:

    Love that Robbie the Robot was recycled for Lost in Space. Waste not, want not.

    Confess the damn invisible alien scared the crap out of me.

  118. 118.

    dexwood

    @Scout211:

     

    @zhena gogolia:

    For me as well. I watched it at my grandmother’s house while all the old folks just shook their heads. Their influence continued in September of 64 when my older cousin and her best friend let me tag along with them to see the Beatles live at the Baltimore Civic Center. I had to pay for my own ticket, but it was the best three bucks of hard-earned lawn mowing money I ever spent. Not to mention, how that show led me down the road of dissipation and decadence that made me what I am today.

  119. 119.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    For whatever reasons, the only thing at all that remains in the memory from that series is the segment titled Camera Obscura.

  120. 120.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @BGinCHI: You’ve been warned.  Seriously though, I wouldn’t trade that childhood for anything.  My brother, who is 6 1/2 years younger than me, doesn’t really remember the time before my parents were homeowners and lived a much more conventionally bourgeois existence.

  122. 122.

    BGinCHI

    @NotMax: I probably never even made it to the end of one.

    I’ve never really liked scary stuff. Probably because life has always been full of enough frightening shit.

  123. 123.

    debbie

    @WaterGirl:

    My favorite was Ackeroyd’s sleazy salesman trying to convince Jane Curtin it was perfectly okay to sell children Halloween costumes like Invisible Pedestrian or Christmas gifts like Bag O’ Broken Glass.?

  124. 124.

    NotMax

    @zhena gogolia

    Were you a watcher of That Was the Week That Was (colloquially known as TW3)? Fond memories of that, as well as the (somewhat later) sadly short-lived Monitor with Lloyd Dobbins and Linda Ellerbee.

  126. 126.

    BGinCHI

    @Omnes Omnibus: I really like that we’re a trio and can do things together and not have to constantly worry about roles. Now that he’s 8, it’s like having my pal with me when I run errands or when we do something for him (swimming, school stuff). I don’t know how anyone does it with multiple kids.

  131. 131.

    trollhattan

    @BGinCHI:

    Agreed, enough scary stuff finds me that I’ve never felt the need to chase down dead teenager flicks (to borrow Roger Ebert’s term).

    With that said, seeing Night of the Living Dead in a theater during its first run was a cultural event because the place was sold out and erupted at all the right, and wrong, places.

  134. 134.

    LivingInExile

    Had a horse throw me into a concrete post when I was a kid.  I caught the post right across my face.  Got up spitting blood and teeth.  Was semi invalid the rest of that summer.  That was when learned to love to read.  Silver lining and all that.

  135. 135.

    zhena gogolia

    @trollhattan:

    I also saw it at a theater during its first run — amazing! And then saw it in college with George Romero in attendance and answering questions afterwards! What a trip!

  137. 137.

    trollhattan

    @NotMax: @HinTN:

    Have been watching the DVDs–saw disk 1, ’67 just last night. First color season. They’re SO cynical and the writers go hammer and tongs after…modern business management? Needless to say that whizzed right past my noggin back in the day.

    I also want to drive Emma’s Lotus Esprit.

  138. 138.

    BGinCHI

    @trollhattan: I like takes on the genre like Shaun of the Dead, and thrillers, but not straight up horror.

    Loved Get Out, for ex., but Us I had a harder time with. I liked it, but the horror parts just aren’t my thing. I don’t get wanting to be scared.

  139. 139.

    Miss Bianca

    @BGinCHI: I’m kind of the same way. Complete weenie when it comes to horror, and as for slasher flicks…forget it.

    Reminds me of the response of one of my fellow clerks waaay back in the day, when I found myself having to explain what “sado-masochism” was:

    “Shit, man…life is rough enough!“

  144. 144.

    debbie

    @trollhattan:

    Yeah, I saw it in Harvard Square at the Brattle Theater and it scared the shit out of me. “They’re coming for you, Barbara.”

  146. 146.

    Ivan X

    Wow, that’s a big one. You can all laugh, but when I was 12 or 13, a bit before it went huge, I heard Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf on a radio station and I had never heard anything remotely like it, it was so vibrant and exciting and full of sonic splendor. It like opened up a new part of my brain, and it shaped much of my music consumption, and eventual production, forevermore.

    I at some point decided I was past all that, but eventually came back to it and now maintain that the album it was on, Rio, is a masterpiece.

    Ok, brandish your flames.

  148. 148.

    HinTN

    @BGinCHI:

    I don’t know how anyone does it with multiple kids.

    That’s a fact. I was the oldest of four and by the time the youngest was born all mama wanted was for me to be self sufficient. I’m still trying to recover from the separation that created.

  151. 151.

    trollhattan

    @zhena gogolia:

    Wow, seeing it with Romero must have been a blast.

    We saw John Cleese last year (his “paying for my divorce” tour). It began with a screening of Holy Grail then audience Q&A moderated by his daughter. Wonderful evening.

    FAR different was many years ago, a screening of “Scorpio Rising” with Kenneth Anger. Wowzers, can’t begin to describe, just will observe I’ve never felt outnumbered by the satanists anywhere else.

  152. 152.

    BGinCHI

    @Ivan X: I would never laugh at this, because I agree completely.

    Rio holds up so well I’m kind of astonished. It’s so damn exuberant, and smart, and even the electronic drums don’t harm it.

    I loved that band during that era.

  153. 153.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    Perhaps the jackaltariat can be of aid. Cannot for the life of me remember the title of a vampire movie involving a whole bunch of them relocating lock, stock and casket to Mexico. In that take on the mythology, wearing sunglasses provided them with sufficient protection during the day.

  156. 156.

    middlelee

    @dexwood: I saw the Beatles in 1964 too.  A friend and I, in our early twenties, took two 14-year-olds for cover.    Cow Palace, SF.  We were in four of 100 seats behind the stage and got to watch all the action on stage and in the auditorium.  Unfuckingbelievable.  Girls climbing on stage, the audience moving forward and pushing everyone in front of it.  I still wonder how we got so lucky because you didn’t have a choice of seats.  You sent in your money and got whatever ticket they sent you.

    Years later when I worked in the library high school teachers (friends of mine) would send their students in to interview me about the Beatles.

  159. 159.

    BGinCHI

    @trollhattan: Been to several “director attending” films, but the best was the premier of The Suspended Step of the Stork, with Theo Angelopoulos, in Toronto.

  160. 160.

    trollhattan

    @middlelee:

    It will always amuse me that The Beatles and The Sex Pistols both concluded their touring history in SF. Must be the water.

  161. 161.

    CaseyL

    1970s: The Golden Age of PBS specials – many of which were originally made for the BBC.  I was a teenager and watched them all.

    I was instantly hooked on and enthralled by the James Burke series “Connections” (1976) wherein he traces the unlikely history of serendipity, luck, and blazing insight that led to the ideas and technologies which have shaped our world. (Example:  a sort of glass pistol invented in the 18th C. as a malaria preventative – the shot “dispelled bad air” – eventually led to the invention of the sparkplug.)

    It was like a fireworks going off in my mind; I had been vaguely thinking about how everything seemed to be connected to everything else, and here was this amazing TV series laying it all out for me – not just the stories in themselves, but how to think about the way things are and how they got that way.

  163. 163.

    gene108

    Big touch stone for me was Star Wars toys. Star Wars came out, when I was three. I barely remembered the movie, but the toys and other things got me hooked on it, so I eagerly awaited <em>The Empire Strikes Back</em>

  168. 168.

    trollhattan

    @BGinCHI:

    Made me look! Sounds like a great opportunity.

    Russ Meyer came to campus when I was in college, with one of his actresses in tow. I’d rank that as my most compelling screening. :-)

  169. 169.

    dexwood

    @middlelee: Great story. i was 13. I couldn’t hear a damn thing through all the screaming, but it was exciting as hell. My cousin and her friend were background dancers on Baltimore’s Buddy Dean Show. They got tickets to everything. The Buddy Dean Show was the influence for the teen dance show in Hairspray.

  170. 170.

    J R in WV

    OK, I went away to college for the first time in summer 1968, after HS graduation. I wanted out of town so bad!

    That summer, everyone in summer school was in one dorm, mostly upper class students who needed a course to graduate on schedule, or needed some standard class that conflicted with a requirement. So I got to know many Juniors and Seniors while I was not quite a freshman yet.

    One day a guy who had introduced me to a lot of fine music said “Hey, some of us are going up to Newport RI this weekend for the Newport Folk Festival. We’ll sleep on (I forget his name)’s floor and the music will be great. So I looked at my cash, decided I could afford tix, a share of the gas, and food and signed up for the long weekend.

    That summer the Folk Festival was concentrated mostly on a famous American Folk Music, The Blues. So white buy from mountain music world, who father was totally into classical music, was introduced to the Blues. You can look up the artists for that summer’s Folk Festival, BB King, Junior Wells, a very young Buddy Guy, and so on and so forth! Janis Joplin and Big Brother was a headliner.

    Saturday afternoon was the old style festival with tents and individual sets. I got to see very elderly frail looking delta musicians playing music they had learned in the previous century, from musicians straight our of Africa. Hand made instruments, slow marching across the stage just 1 or 2 guys, others coming onto stage or walking off, was amazed.

    Lots of other revelations in the year of 1968, ’69 and ’70… but that was a start. That summer/fall was hard to take as a 17 y o away from home. Bobby Kennedy shot down after winning a huge primary in California, the police riots in Chicago, NIxon winning the election, but I’ll never forget the Blues of every kind in Newport those hot summer days.

    I saw Janis live several times, what a performer.

  171. 171.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    Meeting Stanley Kramer at an industry pre-release screening of Bless the Beasts and Children was cool, however the thrill for me that evening was meeting and chatting with John Zacherley, one the celebs running the gamut of every tier who were there.

  172. 172.

    trollhattan

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I’m an Honor Blackman fan. I’m not sure the show was even brought to the States before Rigg, but the few episodes I’ve seen with her are pretty good. Plus, she was a Bond girl in the best Bond movie, while her Avengers run was going. Who can argue with that?

  173. 173.

    SFBayAreaGal

    My mom loved science fiction and collected comic books when she was in her teen years . She was introduced to science fiction  by her local librarian.

    My love for science fiction and comic books comes from her.

    Watching the astronauts landing on the moon with my mom.

  174. 174.

    japa21

    Doctor Zhivago, the book not the movie.  Read it as a sophomore in HS.  Mainly because everybody told me it was too complex a book to read.

    It was not that the book changed my life, but reading it did.  It was the start of my believing I could do things even when others told me I couldn’t.  Sure I failed at times, but always looked back at that moment to know I could succeed.

  175. 175.

    debbie

    @trollhattan:

    We shan’t for sure. If the library ever reopens and it seems everything has been sanitized, I’m going to have to rewatch that series. Also The Prisoner.

  176. 176.

    BGinCHI

    @J R in WV: I love this. Man, to have seen all that in one place at one time.

    It’s true that there’s always something amazing happening in the world, but how to do find it? How do you surf the zeitgeist so that you don’t just have to get lucky?

    For me, it’s always been taking chances when I was most afraid, but forced myself to do it anyway. As a poor, rural kid, I was scared, but even more afraid of living a boring life.

    Sounds like that summer put you on that path.

  177. 177.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @trollhattan: There is an episode of The Avengers where Steed gets a postcard from Cathy Gale and says, “What is she doing at Ft Knox?”  Guess when it was filmed.

  181. 181.

    trollhattan

    @CaseyL:

    “Connections” was captivating. I have the book produced in support of the series and would love to re-watch to see if it holds up. So very many “Wha?!?” moments.

    Anybody ever watch “Look Around You.” Genius send up. Simply wonderful for anybody who wasted their days sitting in front of the teevee in the ’70s (it was done in 2002-2005).

  184. 184.

    SFBayAreaGal

    Seeing 2001 A Space Odyssey after working on a junior high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace.

    My love for science fiction and plays was becoming stronger.

    I was so lucky to go to a public junior high school here in the Bay Area, that had such great teachers.

  186. 186.

    Miss Bianca

    @trollhattan: For some reason that has never been revealed to me, the Detroit Free Press, probably alone among American newspapers, carried the “Modesty Blaise” comic strip, so Modesty was my model of the gorgeous bad-ass British babe crime-fighter, even more than Emma Peel.

    For years, I had one particular comic taped to my refrigerator: Modesty, under cover, gets an improper proposal whispered in her ear by one of the baddies. Last frame is Modesty punching the guy out with a thought bubble over her head: “Damn it, Blaise, you are so uncouth. Nice girls slap faces.”

    I remember starting to write a song with one of my college-era roommates, a fellow fan, “Helplessly Hooked on Modesty Blaise.” Alas, (or perhaps fortunately) no extant version remains. ; )

  187. 187.

    NotMax

    @BGinCHI

    Similar to when went to an industry shindig for the release of a Jesus Christ, Superstar knock-off double album – said recording being a resounding floperoo.

    Managed to chat up Jim Backus (who voiced God on the record) for maybe half an hour while we downed copious drinks. Kick myself to this day for not inquiring if he had any James Dean stories.

  188. 188.

    gene108

    USA “ Up All Night”, hosted by Gilbert Gottfried, cemented my love for sci-fi B-movies, when I was a teenager.

  192. 192.

    middlelee

    @dexwood: We discovered that if we covered our ears we could sort of hear the music.  Paul stopped one of the songs to ask people to shut up and listen.  Didn’t help.

  194. 194.

    Miss Bianca

    @debbie:

    @HinTN:

    Alas, spurting blood has never struck me as funny, only horrifying, so any humor involving blood, guts, or dismembered body parts usually gave me nightmares rather than make me laugh.

    The only exception that comes to mind is the Black Knight in Holy Grail. 

  195. 195.

    satby

    @oatler.: Oh yes, Studs Terkle. When I was older I got to see his office at the radio station. Mike Royko’s book Boss about Richard J Daley had recently come out, and Stud’s copy of it had the dedication

    to Studs, look what you made me do!

    Loved his show. And the replays of old time radio shows on FMT like The Shadow and Fibber McGee

  197. 197.

    CaseyL

    @SFBayAreaGal: Same here!  My family had a rule about reading:  we kids could read anything we got our hands on, but our elders might not explain any of it to us if they didn’t want to.  My Mom got her SF from the library (anthologies) and I would take the books when she was done with them. I was reading SF before I was old enough to really understand most of it.  I think I read the first Dangerous Visions anthology when I was, like, 11.

  198. 198.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I think that’s the one I’ve seen – has there been more than one movie? Pretty lackluster as I recall, but still – Modesty.Blaise. RESPECT!

  199. 199.

    SFBayAreaGal

    Day on the Green by Bill Graham. He could put together different groups and have them perform on the same day.

  202. 202.

    Msilaneous

    The Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan. I was 10 going on 11, and for the next six impressionable years they were my teachers. Their music and lyrics and beliefs and example helped shape and define mine. ♥

  203. 203.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    In this week’s Medium Cool, we want to know what cultural object or idea saved your life. Or, less dramatically, influenced your life in such a way that it was never the same again.

    I can’t say “never again”, but… I did have a faith-restoration moment.

    I’ve been cranky, and out of sorts, and furiously angry, more so at the GOP than Trump. Seriously, folks, while Trump has done incalculable damage, it’s really not his *fault*. The real fault lies with the GOP which has allowed him to maintain the pretense that he’s doing just fine.

    Okay, but, that line of thought will pull out the crankiness again, so let me stop there :-).

    The universe decided to wake me the hell up, by having me binging on the Flash TV series, in time for the Supergirl musical cross-over. Just a silly thing, but the “bad guy” in the episode drops the hat[1], and goes into a rendition of “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”.

    “Think of your fellow man,
    “Lend him a helping hand;
    “Put a little love in your heart….”

    And my cranky mood shouts to the TV “No frickin’ way, that’s CHEATING.”

    “You see it’s getting  late,
    “So please don’t hesitate,
    “Put a little love in your heart.”

    And my cranky mood says “no, that ain’t going to do it, I’m far too pissed off” through the chorus, until…

    “Another day goes by,
    “and still the children cry,
    “put a little love in your heart.”

    Such a simple message – people, even children, are suffering, and we can help fix it…. And I won’t say it wiped out the anger and such… but it did remind me that I *do* have faith in love. Not belief, really, but  faith. Somehow, if we all care about what happens to each other, we really will get through pretty much anything.

    It’s the first time I felt positive in a while, and it happened to coincide with a lovely XKCD that I just  happened upon that very day:

    https://xkcd.com/2287/

    Second to last panel: “It’s not over, right? They can’t sustain this. They must be bored and tired. Will they give up?”
    “I don’t know. They seem determined to protect each other.”

    Yeah. We are – or, at least, we *can* be. And there are more of us, that care about each other, than there are of the bad guys.

    [1] The joke being “it’s a musical, so a new song will start at  the drop of a hat.”

  204. 204.

    NotMax

    @Miss Bianca

    Three movies, IIRC.

    Modesty itself was a misnomer, as she incorporated a trick she call the Nailer* to stun baddies long enough to incapacitate them.

    *going completely topless

  205. 205.

    SFBayAreaGal

    @CaseyL: I was in my 30s when I started reading Harlan Ellison. Whew Dangerous Visions was pretty good.

    If you’re a Star Trek fan, read the original script by Harlan Ellison of “The City on the Edge of Forever”

  206. 206.

    BGinCHI

    @LongHairedWeirdo: I feel you on this. I’ve been having these moments and something keeps pulling me back: puppy, kid, work, kindness of others.

    I love that XKCD too. Genius, that guy.

    I was at a little back yard social the other evening, with distancing. A woman there, who’s a social sciences prof, said, “When this is over, the goddamn culture better acknowledge the arts, and fund  them, because with them a lot of us would be dead, or dying slowly every day, and feeling it.”

  208. 208.

    prostratedragon

    @trollhattan:  “The Howling Man” from season 2. We have many of the same things on our lists. For me, two big influences were also radio stations WFMT (classical, Midnight Special, Studs Terkel) and WVON (blues, early Aretha Franklin, both Motown and Stax).

  209. 209.

    chris

    @Miss Bianca: Modesty Blaise! I never saw the comics in my youth but I read the books and had such a crush. I really wanted to be her psycho sidekick, Willie (?), with the knives.

    Heh, first crush was Ozma. My mother had all the books and I read them over and over. They were also the books that led me to reading late into the night. Which I still do but not under the covers with a flashlight ;-)

  211. 211.

    satby

    @mrmoshpotato: it used to, but the guy who did it died several decades ago I think. When my younger son was between 4-7, we would listen together (he loved The Shadow) and we got to see part of the show live from the Cultural Center. That would have been about 28 years ago. I forget the announcer’s name, but I think the collection of recording was his.

    EDited: found a bio of him and the show. Chuck Schaden and the show was Those Were the Days and he’s still alive!

  212. 212.

    CaseyL

    @SFBayAreaGal: I’m a forever Trek fan, and a former Ellison fan.  I know the story behind “The City on the Edge of Forever,” but never read the original script.  I’ve heard it’s fantastic – but also that it’s not Star Trek, with many of the main characters being completed OUT of character.  But I haven’t read it myself.

  213. 213.

    Josie

    As a pre-teen, I read my way through my father’s collection of western authors – Louis L’Amour, Max Brand, Zany Grey and developed my lifelong obsession with the Old West and Mexico.  Later I discovered McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series and renewed my love of those early days.  Now, as a second career, I am finally trying to write about my favorite subject.  Full circle.

  216. 216.

    James E Powell

    I felt the impact of the same events that affected every other American born around my time (1955): Cuban missile crisis, JFK assassination, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, space program, Viet Nam. But the single most impactful factor in my life was going to Catholic school. The author John Powers, though he was in a different city and he’s ten years older, described it precisely.

  217. 217.

    chris

    Lot of Beatles fans here! Me too. I watched the really big shew with my grandparents. My grandfather, who played piano and the organ in church, was not impressed. “That’s just three chords, anybody can play that.” Or words to that effect.

    But the one that got me even though I didn’t fully understand it was Satisfaction. Story of my life and the Stones have provided the soundtrack all the way.

  221. 221.

    BC in Illinois

    Life changing literary experience (or at least it veared the road a bit) came the day after 8th grade ended. I went to school, voluntarily, to help Mr. Dilts, my Algebra-II teacher, put his books away. At the time, my life goal was to become a math teacher like Mr. Dilts.

    He said, “B____, if you want to become a free thinker, read Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience, Emerson’s Essays [“Self-Reliance” came in there, I think], and the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.”

    I of course did exactly as he said. (I’m surprised that the local library had Gandhi’s autobiography.) This wasn’t an assignment for class — this was Mr. Dilts telling me how to set my mind free. Looking back on it, it was a strong dose of the “individual against the world,” that kind of thing. I’ve often mentioned that in this “man of destiny” mindset, I didn’t speak to a girl all summer.  In a year or two, Tolkien would take center stage in the “epic quest” view of life. 

    But I think that Mr. Dilts’s reading list had a big part in the big transition of my life from age 14 to age 19 — from the Belt Jr. High Youth for Goldwater to the Solidarity Day March of the Poor People’s March on Washington, 1968.

  222. 222.

    satby

    The formative book of my youth was Hoffer’s The True Believer. I read it when I was about 14, and I owe my cynicism about populists in politics and religion to it. The language is dated for today’s audience, and Hoffer was conservative, but it’s stayed with me my whole life.

  229. 229.

    suezboo

    In 1957, I was ten. I went reluctantly to the school fete which  was mandatory for all us Convent girls. I was mooching around the stalls, bored beyond tedium, when the background music suddenly burst through. One of the senior girls must have been in charge as I am sure none of the nuns would have played All Shook Up by Elvis at those decibels. For me, it was a revelation – a beat, a rhythm i could love and move to. Life-changer.

  230. 230.

    CarolPW

    By the time I was 10 I had read all of the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the Britanica kid’s books (Treasure Island, Heidi, Robinson Crusoe etc.). Tiny town, no library, and I didn’t even live in town but 3 miles away. The school had a book sale and classes were released to attend. I took my hoarded savings of nickels and dimes and the two books I bought were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Three Musketeers. My mental world changed. The next year I was earning dollars instead of dimes babysitting, and talked my parents into taking me to Tower Books (the original one!) and started buying books in earnest. My world became a much bigger one than I started out with. And it just kept getting bigger. This is the first time since I was 10 that the world got smaller, because I am locked down and so stressed I can’t manage to read anymore.

  231. 231.

    Ivan X

    @BGinCHI: nice to share this with you! those first two albums are really something special. I liked the third album at the time, but I wouldn’t now say it has stood the test of time. It’s all pretty downhill after that, though catching them on their reunion tour in 2003 was pretty great, you could see how much they were enjoying themselves.

    My next big ear opener was New Order’s The Perfect Kiss from their album Low-life, and after that was Ministry’s Twitch LP, which cast me into considerably more esoteric territory.

  232. 232.

    danielx

    A zillion books, but…if I had to pick one event it was seeing Led Zeppelin on their first US tour. I was in my early teens at the time and a relatively clean cut boy, but everything about them warped my little mind – music, look, everything. I was all, man, I gotta get me some more of THAT…and all semblance or hope of normalcy was gone.

  235. 235.

    zhena gogolia

    I really should mention when my mother took me to see Edward Villella and Patricia McBride at the Kansas City Ballet. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  237. 237.

    trollhattan

    @Amir Khalid:

    Ah yes, the Elan, replaced by Tara’s Europa.

    I’m a-feared our All British car show is going to be a corona victim this year. Sad :-( Quite a few Lotii are always there.

  238. 238.

    joel hanes

    As a new sophomore, joined the high school debate team.

    I had never before been around brilliant people with intellectual pretensions, people who at least tried to take ideas seriously.   The seniors on the team were reading philosophy, reading Camus, Kafka, Nietsche, Dostoyevsky, listening to The Fugs and Zappa and Country Joe, taking Russian language classes, putting out an “underground” newspaper.   They pressured the administration to allow them to organize a Viet Nam Moratorium day with teach-ins … I still have the T-shirt we made with the Columbia University strike fist.    They talked about West’s _Bury_My_Heart_At_Wounded_Knee_, and eventually I got it and read it.

    Several of them were major assholes, and I absorbed some of that arrogance and contempt (I started with some of my own)  and I’m sure that I haven’t completely lost all of it.    But because of those guys, my life-long but unformed delight in knowing things becamea long bookish journey, with many guides (John McPhee, Richard Powers, Feynman, EB White, JD Salinger, Dorothy Sayers, Ursula LeGuin), down many roads, with no end in sight.

    My father, the last generalist, who has always instructed me that one should attempt, hopelessly, to know everything, never once tells me , point blank, why trying to know left him so fiercely alone and lost.
    — Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma

  239. 239.

    Haroldo

    Seeing the Banana Man with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Forest Park in the summer of, I dunno, 1959.  Age 7.

    Reading (and re-reading!) Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves after finding it in my dad’s dresser drawer.  Age 15.

    Hearing The White Trash Blues Band in the Premontre High School gym.  Age 16.

    Seeing Belle du Jour and Repulsion and understanding them with my junior high school French.  Age 17.

    Hearing Roy Haynes’ snare drum on Coltrane’s My Favorite Things in the middle of the night on WHAM.  Age 17.

    Reading Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.  Age 17.  (One of these has aged a lot better than the other.)

    Hearing Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard.  Age 21.

    Hearing Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.  Age 22.

    Thanks for the memories…..

  240. 240.

    patrick II

    When I was 7 or 8 (1956 or so)  my Aunt Mary gave me a book for my birthday with a title of something like “Our World”.  It was a coffee table style book for kids a little older than I was at the time.  It explained the history of the planet, evolution, it had pictures of dinosaurs and rain forests.  I remember one picture in particular, even now, of the earth’s crust, shown from the side, with the layers of magma, rock, earth and a giant volcanic eruption.  I read and reread that book, and have read books ever since.

    Sadly, Aunt Mary did not have a long life and passed away the following year. I owe her.

  242. 242.

    Miss Bianca

    @chris: I loved Ozma too, and the fact that she was introduced as a boy named Tip who was then *turned into the girl* who became known as Ozma blew my mind as a young ‘un.

  243. 243.

    Denali

    I am pretty sure I saw Joan Baez in concert.  Am certain I saw Nina Simone because I remember she got upset at the audience. Think they did not really get her.

  244. 244.

    joel hanes

    @Haroldo:

     the Banana Man

    Yes!   He used to be on Captain Kangaroo.  Hardly anyone remembers him — what an amazing walk-on act.

  245. 245.

    pajaro

    For single work for me it was Freedom Road, by Howard Fast, which I read right about the time I started High School.  I remember being dumbfounded with rage.

    My most important teacher was Rabbi David Polish, at Beth Emet Synagogue in Evanston.

  246. 246.

    zhena gogolia

    @joel hanes:

    I am about to reread it. I love all the trilogies, but of all the trilogies Deptford is the best and of Deptford, Fifth Business is the best.

  247. 247.

    Zelma

    When I was maybe 8 someone gave me an old book, a history of the world for children.  I devoured it and started reading histories and biographies and historical fiction.  I also saw the movie Young Bess around then and became a precocious Anglophile.  When I was about 12 or 13, I discovered both Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer.  The rest (of my life) was history and especially late 18th and early 19th century England.  Did my dissertation on the politics of the era.

  254. 254.

    joel hanes

    @CaseyL:

    Dangerous Visions

    Yes!    Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” was really the first feminist anything I ever read.   Chad Oliver’s dark “King Of The Hill” is still prescient.   And LeGuin’s incandescent anger in _The_Word_For_World_Is_Forest_, the angriest of any of her works …

  256. 256.

    Haroldo

    @joel hanes:

    I had never before been around brilliant people with intellectual pretensions, people who at least tried to take ideas seriously. The seniors on the team were reading philosophy, reading Camus, Kafka, Nietsche, Dostoyevsky, listening to The Fugs and Zappa and Country Joe, taking Russian language classes, putting out an “underground” newspaper.

    It’s interesting. I hung around folks in my smallish high school who were smart and we did things similar to this but it was not until I got to our state university (UW at Madison) that I encountered students from the East Coast – those people took that shit seriously, well beyond what I had considered up until then to be just part of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

  258. 258.

    Uncle Cosmo

    One morning in February 1973, floundering in the deep waters of academic failure, emotional bereavement, poverty and directionless despair, I opened a volume I should not have owned by a poet I hadn’t much read – and it fell open to this poem.

    So many lines that might have been written just for me, not only to read silently but to cry out loud at the universe. Especially in the rising crescendo:

    I have left you my hope to remember me by,
    Though now there is little resemblance.
    At this moment I could believe in no change,
    The mast perpetually
    Vacillating between the same constellations,
    The night never withdrawing its dark virtue
    From the harbor shaped as a heart,
    The sea pulsing as a heart,
    The sky vaulted as a heart,
    Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
    Above a discovery:
    “Emptiness.
    Emptiness! Look!”

    – and then the cool, clear finality of acceptance:

    Look. This is the morning.

    And I knew, somehow, I had touched bottom, and started on my way back to light and air.

    ———
    Eight years later I went to hear Merwin read, and spoke with him afterwards: Your poetry got me through some really bad times back in 1973. – I’m glad you told me that, he replied, and seemed genuinely touched. I told him I’d been trying to write like him ever since. Oh, don’t imitate! he snapped, then, reflectively, If you must imitate, imitate diction. The images should be your own.

    Well of course, I said. Of course, he replied, smiling. And he signed my copy of The Lice.

    William Stanley Merwin – my Perfect Master and Hero Of The Zeitgeist – died on 15 March 2019, age 91:

    oh if we knew

    if we knew what we needed if we even knew
    the stars would look to us to guide them

  259. 259.

    prostratedragon

    When I was 6 an uncle gave me a little record player and two sets of records. One was a collection of standard hymns on 78 (lot of preachers in the family, though this uncle was definitely off-brand), and the other was a child’s introduction to classical music. It had been compiled by Mitch Miller, and included some of everything from Bach to Bartok. I wore those records out over the next couple of years. Still hear “Now the Day is Over” as I go off to sleep sometimes.

  265. 265.

    prostratedragon

    (Just typed a comment and submitted it, and was told to type a comment.)

    Tribute to WEMU radio, Ypsilanti, one of the last of the locally produced jazz stations.

  266. 266.

    narya

    Kurt Vonnegut, “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.” I was 12 or so and had wandered into the adult fiction section. (I’ve since come to have a lot of problems with KV’s issues with women, but still.)

    National Lampoon and Ms magazines–I’d read them at the public library. Rolling Stone mag, and I was a charter subscriber (while in high school) to Mother Jones.

    Exile on Main Street, and Bruuuuuce (I grew up in Jersey).

    They all helped me see that there were freaks out there somewhere.

    Later (much): Wittgenstein and Pierre Bourdieu.

  267. 267.

    Inspectrix

    -Reading the Diary of Anne Frank in 7th grade was like opening a portal into aspects of the world previously unseen by me. I remember thinking, how did something so horrible happen in the world, and nobody bothered to tell me about it until now? 

    -Like Alice above, Our Bodies, Ourselves was a revelation. Reading it was empowering.  It probably factored into my decision to volunteer in a women’s abortion loan program during college, which led to my eventually working in a women’s clinic as a receptionist, which eventually led to my applying to medical school.

    -Music… so many options. Sinead O’Connor taught me the power of women’s anger (and how to look cool with really short hair);Patty Griffin’s debut album gave me a voice to hold on to during some dark times, and she has continued to bring joy to my ears ever since; watching Rattle and Hum and realizing I belated needed to own entire U2 catalog;  and listening to Josh Ritter for the first time and thinking he was 70 years old, he sounded so wise.

    -Taking a parenting class with the conductor of a community choir who told me that I could still join the choir even if I didn’t think I could sing at all, because adults are like kids, and they can learn to imitate sounds just as well.  Several years on, I sing in that choir, even though around the time I read Anne Frank, I had given up being able to carry a tune

    -And one more- finding a book of Mary Oliver’s poetry at a beachy bookstore

  268. 268.

    Croaker

    You libs always on bout crying bout dis and dat.

    A block of wood and nail. Cause it was good

    Actually Marx toy soldiers, D&D, Risk and then Everything else

    Crit you all. Cry lib tears.

    Cause where there whip there’s a way.

  270. 270.

    MoCA Ace

    @Uncle Cosmo:   Wow that is deep.  Mine is much more mundane.

    Lots of weed, a few good friends, Pink Floyd and a black light with glowing constellation maps on the ceiling.  Worked through a lot of shit in that basement.

  271. 271.

    Smalla

    For me it’s the Indigo Girls.  I had gone through a religious phase in college, but then became disillusioned because of the pride.  I lost my religion and my sense of self and their music helped me move on.

  273. 273.

    Ruckus

    @pamelabrown53:

    Decisions and mistakes are what separates the great from the rest. We all make decisions and mistakes, it’s what we do with them, what we learn from them, it’s how we grow, how we learn about ourselves so that we can get to be better people. People who don’t grow still make decisions and mistakes but don’t learn what was right in front of them to learn how to make better decisions and fewer mistakes. And the most important thing to learn is that the bad decisions and mistakes are based upon what we know at any moment and have seen and the unforeseen is always, always going to be there to turn good decisions into bad and success into mistakes. Or exactly the opposite. 

  274. 274.

    Ruckus

    @Mary G:

    I was sick a lot as a kid, as most of us our age were. And so I read. A lot. A normal week was 4 to 5 books. I ran out of new stuff to read out of the kids section and our conservative library wouldn’t let a child check out anything out of the adult side. Mom took me to the library and told the librarian to give me an adult card. She got push back. She stepped up her argument and threw in a rather choice “adult” word as well as looking like she was going to reach over the counter and deck the librarian. I got my adult card before I was 12. And learned how to talk to conservative jackoffs. A great day.

  275. 275.

    frosty

    It’s hard to say. There have probably been a lot of them, but here’s two: reading all of Mark Twain in early adolescence. Confirmed that it was OK to be a cynic and that religion was bunk. Second, and completely different:  After hearing the Allman Brothers I started to learn slide guitar. 40 years later I’m still trying!

  276. 276.

    Ruckus

    @jeffreyw:

    I liked Robbie the Robot, till all the other kids saw it. Kids can be cool or assholes with nicknames. Some were both.

  277. 277.

    Ruckus

    @HinTN:

    I was good friends with a Japanese girl that lived a couple doors down  from me. We had the same birthday and she told me she was born in Tokyo so we were figuring out which one of us was actually born first to the minute. This was before we were in school. I was 65 yrs old when I found out she has a wicked good sense of humor and was screwing with me, she was born in LA just like me.

  278. 278.

    Ruckus

    @James E Powell:

    Spent my freshman year HS at a catholic all boys, technical HS. I was already an atheist by then but if I hadn’t been that year would have made me one. I was raised presbyterian as well so it was a disaster on a couple of levels.

Comments are closed.