"Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were both born in 1964, the very last year of the Baby Boom."

"Yet many in that cohort feel no identification with baby boomers. But neither are they Gen Xers. They are people in-between. Perhaps in 2024, this status now enables public figures to be 'in between' in new ways, to wear their gender more lightly."

Those are the last few sentences of "Paying More Attention to His Appearance Than Hers/They’re the same age, but pundits and voters can’t stop talking about how much older Tim Walz looks than Kamala Harris. It’s not the only way her running mate seems to be absorbing some of the scrutiny usually heaped on female candidates" by Rhonda Garelick in the NYT.

That's from August 12th. I was looking for something else when I ran into that, and I got engrossed.

The idea of wearing one's gender lightly intrigues me.

What was I actually looking for? I was thinking about the time President Bill Clinton, running for reelection, wanted to use federal spending to incentivize public schools to require their students to wear uniforms.

My search terms — Clinton, school, and uniform — all came up in that Harris/Walz article:

... Hillary Clinton... came to prominence as first lady, as a “wife,” and was assailed for her hair and style, her presumed disrespect for “cookie baking” and for tolerating her husband’s transgressions.

... Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, was called “a hectoring schoolmarm” for offering expert policy explanations, and advised to change her glasses and hair.

... Ms. Harris hews generally toward a sleek uniform of pantsuit, silk blouse, pearls and heels, which “suggest fashion without being too fashionable”...

"I feel like people younger than I am have an idea of what [the] 90s were like that increasingly has little to do with..."

"... my actual lived experience of being a teenager/twenty-some[t]hing in the 90s. This clip in all of its awkward, heartbreaking, briefly, inexplicably lovely 'how did all of these people end up here together?' energy is exactly it for me"/"It’s remarkable how the vibe of everyone on-set changes when Elliott Smith starts playing the song, they all seem like people who’ve all fled their god’s command to seek truth and beauty, and then that song rises from the deep and swallows them all, even the puppet."

2 comments at Metafilter, reacting to this 1995 clip from the FX show "Breakfast Time."

Hosting the show are: 1. Tom Bergeron (later of "America’s Funniest Home Videos" and "Dancing With The Stars"), 2. Laurie Hibberd (AKA Laurie Gelman, who published a 2022 novel titled "Smells Like Tween Spirit"), and 3. Bob (a puppet):

Elliott Smith died, in 2003, of 2 stab wounds to the chest. He left a note: "I'm so sorry—love, Elliott. God forgive me.

Dianne Feinstein has died.

"Senator Dianne Feinstein Dies at 90/The California Democrat, the oldest member of the Senate, had been declining in health for months" (NYT).

ADDED: The NYT story is just a squib with the notation "This is a developing story. Please check back for updates." I can't understand why they wouldn't have a long and complete obituary ready to publish at the push of a button.

AND: From the WaPo obituary:

Mrs. Feinstein won her Senate seat in what became known as the Year of the Woman, an election that sent 24 new women to the House of Representatives and brought the total number of female senators to six.

"Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced..."

"... and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on 'Saturday Night Live' against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone...."

Writes Jason Zinoman in "In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird/Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character" (NYT).

That awful arrest took place in 1991, O'Connor's tearing of a photograph of the Pope happened in 1992. If you lived though that era — the NYT considers it an entire "age"! — do you remember with any specificity the kind of "moralizing"? I remember the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I remember "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." If the "age" that is 1991-1992 is expansive enough to go back to 1985, I remember when 11-year-old Karenna Gore activated her mother by playing Prince's "Darling Nikki."

If only there were blogging back then! The "dopey moralizing scandals" — is that the right phrase? — of the time had to do with fearsome sexuality. I don't think it's wise to explain them as transitory dopiness. We can always predict that 3 decades later we will look back and think we were dumb, but it's also dumb to think that there's no worthy morality, just "dopey moralizing."

By the way, the opposite of "dopey" — which means stupefied by sleep or a drug — is "woke."

The 90s are back... for people who never lived through the 90s, I guess.

This is Levi's now:

"Who are these dolls for? Little girls, but really, their mothers, who took their dolls to the American Girl 'hospital' for repairs, who lovingly brushed their hair..."

"... who still read think pieces on the Samantha aesthetic, or Molly’s potential sexuality or what their choice of girlhood doll foretold for their adult personality. (This author, past owner of a Felicity, was indeed a Horse Girl who 'grew up to have an affinity for lovely things [and] a possibly inflated sense of your own uniqueness,' as [the article at that third link] predicted.) Her daughter is getting a little old for dolls, says [one mother]. But she might get Isabel and Nicki anyway. 'I think I’m going to buy them because I want them for myself,' she says. 'Having those dolls would kind of just give me a piece of my childhood back.'"

From a WaPo article about the new American Girl dolls —  Isabel and Nicki — that supposedly represent the historical era known as 1999.

Did you ever buy your child a toy that was really more about you reliving — or idealizing — your own childhood?

"The ’90s are infectious. The decade was so colorful with neon colors. Nothing was that serious."

"It was, 'Let’s enjoy life, let’s make friends.' We had Beavis and Butt-Head, we had block parties, we had fanny packs.... The ’90s was the last of the great decades, because after that, computers killed the world. We were excited about things like floppy disks. Now there are so many channels that divide everybody and try to control your thoughts. In the ’90s they reported the news. It wasn’t this side or that side. I have fans on every side of everything...."

Said Vanilla Ice, quoted in "Ice, Ice Baby/The 1990s rapper known as Vanilla Ice is back, performing concerts, opening a museum and hawking a namesake energy drink" (NYT).

The Times interviewer pokes him with: "You performed at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve in 2020, to a maskless crowd during a height of the pandemic. How is that not political?"

Here are 10 TikToks that jumped out at me in the last 24 hours. Let me know what you like best.

1. We seem to have found the kid in the world who is the happiest about going to school.

2. Meanwhile, Baby Trump has some problems with school.

3. Ricky Gourmet hits a mysterious vibe.

4. An impression of the vocal stylings of liberal podcasters.

5. Looking through a book of photographs by Joel Sternfeld.

6. The church with 2 mailboxes.

7. How to use the magic phrase "Some people love it."

8. All the things from the 90s this teenager cannot understand.

9. A 1-minute review of 70s fashion.

10. Epic adulting life hack: Accept mediocrity!

"Alternative music expanded into the umbrella of alternative culture, meaning the prefix 'alt' could now be applied to almost anything for an instant jolt of reconsideration."

Writes Chuck Klosterman on page 307 of "The Nineties." 

Yes, my name was cooler in the 90s/early 00s. I remember. It makes me think about the time a law professor told me:

[Y]ou should call your blog "alt.house" (alt-dot-house), which simultaneously (a) uses your name, (b) uses "house" more directly to suggest a place, (c) is a cyber-pun, riffing on the old "alt-dot-whatever" names for usenet newsgroups, and, relatedly, (d) with the "alt" prefix, implies the ever-so-slightly offbeat nature of what you write about and how you write about it.

And as long as I'm talking about that book again, let me quote something else that jumped out at me.... Oh, no, this needs to be a new post, otherwise it will seem as though I'm burying it. Hang on.

"In 1997, the alt-rock band Harvey Danger had a minor hit with the song 'Flagpole Sitta.' One of the lines from the song was, 'And I don’t even own a TV'..."

"... which was a phrase a certain kind of person used to say a lot during this era. It was a sign of pretension, but also code for brainpower and maturity—a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time. Though accepted as true by virtually every knee-jerk intellectual of the time, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why TV was considered so inferior to not just film, but to almost every other variety of entertainment from this era. The prevalence of that dismissive view clearly had no relationship to its popularity—statistically speaking, television was more popular than everything. But here again: In the nineties, that was its own kind of problem. If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?"

From Chuck Klosterman's "The Nineties" (pp. 232-233)(noting that critics considered "Frasier" brilliant television because it had characters who were the kind of people who would never watch television).

I especially like the 1991 segment — mixing the "hello"s from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with Uncle Leo's "hello" and the "hello" from Jerry's girlfriend's bellybutton.

"The Seinfeld Theme Mixed With A Hit Song From Every Year Seinfeld Was On TV": 

"There was an unspoken understanding among women that we were on a collective and never-ending diet. It was a hellish time..."

"... but it seemed completely normal. And I haven’t even touched on Bridget Jones.... a film series portraying a 130lb woman as a disgusting sad lump....  Of course this is not to suggest that millennials are the first or last generation to be subject to unattainable beauty standards. While the body positivity movement has done so much to shift the conversations we have about our bodies, Gen-Zers are already beginning to deconstruct their own relationship to TikTok and Instagram’s faux empowerment of the 'slim thicc' ideal-type. I mourn the life I could have lived if the Nineties had just let me weigh what I weighed."

From "Millennials were traumatised by Nineties fatphobia" (Evening Standard).

"Slim-thicc" refers to an overweight woman with a relatively small waist and a somewhat flat stomach. It seems to be fat acceptance within the narrow range of the conventional appreciation of voluptuousness. That is, you can weigh a lot and look great but only if it's distributed according to a certain traditional preference. That's the ideal that, in the future, Gen-Zers will look back on in articles about what traumatized them in the 2020s.

"The 90s were the best. We didn’t have coronavirus, or cell phones, or computers. We had 5.0's, blockbuster, Beavis and Butthead, Wayne's World, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan..."

"... Mortal Kombat is still better than Fortnight ... the last of the great decades."

And we had Vanilla Ice — who is quoted above, from "Vanilla Ice throwing Fourth of July concert: 'We didn't have coronavirus' in the '90s/The 'Ice Ice Baby' singer will perform for thousands in Texas, where coronavirus cases are surging" (Entertainment Weekly).

The concert will be in a large outdoor venue — Emerald Point Bar & Grill, on the shore of Lake Travis in Austin — and they're only selling tickets for half the capacity, so people can socially distance.

I take the coronavirus serious. But we can’t live in a bubble.
I think at this point we all understand the severity of it. practice social distancing and wear a mask. This is an outside venue, Fourth of July on the lake with fireworks. Plenty of room for distancing.

— Vanilla Ice (@vanillaice) July 2, 2020

By they way, "Beavis and Butt-Head" are back: "Beavis and Butt-Head being rebooted for a Gen Z world by Comedy Central" (Entertainment Weekly).

AND: With all that attention, he's out:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Vanilla Ice (@vanillaiceofficial) on Jul 2, 2020 at 10:27am PDT

The perils of futurism in the world of Donald Trump.

I ran into this April 1991 New York Magazine article "Star Bores/Too Much Madonna? Too Much Nancy, Teddy, Cher? Or Is There Never Enough?"

This was purely by accident, as I was searching for something that I never found — a common saying from the past that was something like: Americans can't understand any message that won't fit on a T-shirt. Or: Any political philosophy that can't fit on a T-shirt might as well not exist because Americans are not terribly intellectual and have a short attention span.

That question came up in the context of writing a post this morning that contained the quoted sentence: "Intellectual curiosity has been replaced by ostentatious consumption, quality by quantity and political activism by slogans that fit on baseball caps."

In the comments Fernandistein reacted to that quote:

That is a standard and ageless "I'm better than most people" statement, but I wonder if the emitter of those words was intellectually curious enough to know that baseball caps didn't exist until around 1900, and that acronyms were almost non-existent until the 1940s, and that the slogan he refers to is actually more complicated and effective than the slogan of his probable hero.

The link on "probable hero" goes to the "F" section of Wikipedia's list of political slogans, so I'm not positive which "F" slogan is being pointed at, but I believe it is "Forward," and the "probable hero" is Barack Obama.

And samanthasmom said:

Baseball caps are better than campaign buttons. They keep your head warm or cool and shade your eyes from the sun. We've just become more practical with how we wear our slogans.

That got me thinking about the old T-shirt line, which was itself something that would fit on a T-shirt, but I guess it wasn't snappy enough to remember verbatim. And the internet won't help me. I found a huge page of "T-shirt Quotes" at BrainyQuote and they all seem to be somebody saying it's stylish to wear a T-shirt.

"I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet," said Giorgio Armani, which can't possibly be true, though it might be "true" within the fashion designer mentality, which is ridiculously nonliteral.

But I stumbled into "Star Bores." Who was everyone sick of in 1991? Of course, I did the normal 2019 thing and searched the text for "Trump." I scored:



Remember Faith Popcorn — the futurist? Remember futurists? "Donald Trump had no business in the spotlight." That's great. Especially the "had"... all the way back in 1991.The futurist we barely remember was talking about a man whose stardom seemed to be in the past. She had no inkling that 3 decades later he would be the biggest star in the world. Futurism ain't what it used to be. Or maybe it is, because futurism used to be wrong. I can see that now. Hindsight is 2019... and quite hilarious:

"1994 was a great year for music, and May 10 was one of the better days that year."

"Three bands, all categorized as alt rock but all significantly different from each other, put out great albums 25 years ago today," writes my son John on his blog, with 3 clips from Weezer ("Weezer"), 3 from Sonic Youth ("Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star"), and only one from the band you're least likely to remember.



If you want to destroy my sweater/Hold this thread as I walk away/Watch me unravel I'll soon be naked...

"1994 was a great year for me because that's when I started really discovering and learning to play music, around age 13."

"And 25 years ago today, March 8, 1994, was a great day for music, because that's when Soundgarden released Superunknown, and Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral. These weren't just some of the better records by a couple heavy, alternative bands of the mid-'90s. They were that, but they were something more. Listening to them now brings us back to a time when a rock band could be massively successful while daring to break out of formulas and challenge listeners. Here are 5 highlights from each album...."

Writes my son John on his blog, and if you go there, you'll get the 10 highlights, with discussion.

What were you listening to in 1994? I was listening to these recordings, because John was playing them, and I'm glad I had the experience, which I wouldn't have had if I'd been making my own selections at the time.

"Just in case everyone is getting too carried away with the apparent wonders of the computer age..."

"... Clifford Stoll is here with a warning in 'Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.' There may be roadblocks up ahead," cautions Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a 1995 NYT book review, "Feeling Hornswoggled By the Computer Age," which I stumbled into — I kid you not — because I was searching for the word "hornswoggle" in the NYT archive. Hey, you have your research projects, and I have mine.

Anyway, I was up for reading and blogging the review because — 1995! I want to see how people were casting doubt on the internet in 1995. I remember the dubiousness about the internet in the early-to-mid 90s. (I even had a letter to the editor on the subject published in the NYT in 1993 — here.)

Back to Mr. Lehmann-Haupt:

As [Stoll] tells it, his misgivings began on a vacation, when he found himself on a Connecticut farm, "bathed in the cold glow of my cathode-ray tube, answering E-mail." A sense of disorientation set in, a disconnection from the physical world. He felt virtually unreal.

So he begins his book by deploring the lack of physical sensation in cyberspace. The game of Adventure is no substitute for actual spelunking, he reminds us. People won't shop by computer; they prefer real money and flesh-and-blood salespeople.

Ha ha ha.

Children need human teachers, not video screens. E-mail's all right when you've just got something to say, but E-mail's not right when you're trying to get people's attention; the Postal Service is more reliable, he insists, and far more forgiving of mistaken addresses. Besides, real letters have stamps on them, and unique handwriting, which has declined because of computers, like everyone's prose style despite the belief that computers would inspire better writing. And a compact disk is no substitute for a book. 

A compact disc? I think he's talking about music.

Goaded by this enmity toward the abstractness of computing, Mr. Stoll proceeds to a general attack on hardware, software and their various interfaces....  In the electronic library of the future, you won't be able to browse through the stacks, although, he adds, given the immensity of the task, the prospect of digitizing all books is probably beyond realization. The flow of bits can be surprisingly slow under certain circumstances. Even the dream of video on demand is unrealizable, he writes. "It's a surprisingly tough engineering job, keeping a thousand movies ready for instant retrieval."...

Look out for The Past's Future. It's terrible!

"But the one-hour TV special was such a nonevent of excruciating cliches and non-sexiness that it’s not worth a cultural renovation. It’s a teardown."

"Or we could all just get out of the way and let it rot until it falls down on its own....  You’d think Victoria’s Secret would have made sure this show was exciting and captivating — a sort of good-faith argument in favor of its stubborn commitment to marketing-as-usual. Instead, executives produced a show in which the models paraded down the runway like dusty showgirls blowing kisses and drawing hearts in the air, with one model practically indistinguishable from another... If the show is all about empowered models, why not identify them by name when they appear onstage? Or is anonymity part of the fantasy? If some of these women can attract millions of Instagram followers just by posting selfies from elevators, imagine the thrill Victoria’s Secret might be able to gin up if it really made the show about connecting with these women — not in some earnest, substantial way, of course, but in a gleefully superficial, faux-intimate, social media-enhanced way that would be perfect for television. It takes an extraordinary amount of ineptitude, laziness and sheer disregard to make a show as stultifying and lifeless as the Victoria’s Secret one. It may be that the company was so focused on defending its casting against those who call it anachronistic that it forgot that the whole argument becomes moot if the show is so boring that it’s unwatchable."

Writes Robin Givhan in "The Victoria’s Secret fashion show is too boring to even argue about" (WaPo).

I've always assumed the show is unwatchable, and it seemed anachronistic to me all along. When did it begin? I have to look it up, because Givhan didn't mention it. I was not back in the days when bras and panties were called "unmentionables." It was 1995. The middle of the Clinton administration. The first season of "Friends." The Oklahoma City bombing. Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment. "Forrest Gump" won the Oscar. O.J. Simpson went on trial. Maybe much of America saw this as a time to watch tall, fit women prance around in bras and panties from a mall store, but it seemed hopelessly old fashioned to me. It's boring and unwatchable now, Robin Givhan says, and I don't doubt it. But why was it ever watchable?

"What’s novel about 'Friends,' or what must seem so to a certain subset of New York teenagers of whom so much is expected, is the absence among the six central characters of any quality of corrosive ambition."

"The show refuses to take professional life or creative aspirations too seriously. What does Chandler Bing actually do? I was never entirely sure. In the series’ ninth season he is an advertising intern. On 'Girls' you have writers who are trying to be Mary Karr; on 'Friends' you have actors who want to be on 'Days of Our Lives.' The dreamscape dimension of 'Friends' lies in the way schedules are freed up for fun and shenanigans and talking and rehashing, always. 'In the back of our minds we know it’s unrealistic,' Maggie Parham, a 15-year-old who lives on the Upper West Side, told me. The characters 'have nice apartments and lots of free time but there is something about that perfect lifestyle that is fun to watch,' she said, adding, 'They all work, but they seem to be able to get out of work easily.'... [A 17-year-old girl said] 'All they do is hang out in a coffee shop or a really nice apartment... It’s the ideal situation.'"

From "‘Friends’ Has New BFFs: New York Teenagers" (NYT). That's from 2015, but I'm reading it today because it's linked in a new article in the Times, "Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement," which notes that "the show has found an especially receptive audience on Netflix, where it became available in 2015."

And here's a New York Magazine article rom 2016, “Is ‘Friends’ Still the Most Popular Show on TV?”

The world of Friends is ­notable, to modern eyes, for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a ­matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism...  Which is why you might expect that Friends, like similar cultural relics of that era, would be safely preserved in the cryogenic chamber of our collective nostalgia. And yet, astonishingly, the show is arguably as popular as it ever was — and it is popular with a cohort of young people who are only now discovering it....

I myself am just watching the show for the first time, going at a rate of about an episode a day, and just getting to the end of Season 3.

Drudge celebrates the 20-year anniversary of the story that made Drudge Drudge.

In the upper-left corner of Drudge right now:



That links to the old stories, as originally published, beginning with:

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference....

"The president's sexual preference" is how people said "blow jobs" 20 years ago.*

NEWSWEEK and Isikoff were planning to name the woman. Word of the story's impeding release caused blind chaos in media circles....

Michael Isikoff was not available for comment late Saturday. NEWSWEEK was on voice mail.

The White House was busy checking the DRUDGE REPORT for details.

And we've all been busy checking Drudge ever since. I'm exaggerating, saying "all." I know some resist. They're busy avoiding checking Drudge.
_______________________

* We're much less prissy these days. Back then, we wouldn't use the rude words when they applied literally. These days, we use rude words just to be funny or emphatic — e.g., "shithole countries" — even though some of us still think we can get our fellow countrymen gasping over the outrage that the president's language preferences include a dirty word.

ADDED: I remember the reaction to Drudge 20 years ago, especially a lawprof colleague saying (angrily): "He's not a journalist," meaning that he should not be speaking conspicuously, exercising independent judgment about what is news, because he doesn't have the credentials that authorize him to operate in the profession called journalism. She said this very emphatically, as if it was somehow going to make Drudge go away or stop us from looking at him. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to start blogging that very day.