Against the Eighties Bonus: Madonna!

All the hubbub about the 30-year anniversary of Madonna's debut album inspired me to write this last night and edit it this morning. Enjoy! 

As an eleven-year-old adolescent living in Kansas, my only connection to the burgeoning, wilting New York City art scene was Madonna’s self-titled debut album. Like so many other children of the Eighties, my own early conceptions of sex were shaped by my mediated interactions with her. It started innocently, with a dream I had sometime after hearing “Borderline” for the first time, when I had a dream that she visited my school with her artsy entourage and picked me out to be her friend. Things got complicated when Playboy printed photos in 1985 from her now-mythic 1978 Lee Friedlander photo shoot, and I spent more than an hour at the 7-11 pretending to play the Journey Escape video game while sidling over to the magazine rack, only to be kicked out by a college student working the front the moment I touched the Playboy. And I was spurned when she married Sean Penn in 1986 and rubbed it in my face by dedicating her next album, True Blue, to him. I was secretly gratified when the marriage publicly failed, and wanted to find Penn and hold him to account when I read that he’d beaten and left her “trussed up like a turkey” when she gave him the divorce papers. I’ve since forgiven Penn, but I still haven’t watched the movie At Close Range, which features my favorite Madonna song, “Live to Tell.”

Against the Eighties: In which I troll merrily

After my first year of junior high I had an additional thing to keep me company in my room at home—the yearbook. I knew everybody’s name and profile, what clubs they were in, what sports they played. I examined everyone’s signature, especially the ones who wrote me personalized notes. “Stay cool, Spidey.” “See ya next year, Monkey.” (My nickname was Spider Monkey.) “Hi eat a lot this summer and please lift weights.” “I’m glad you got out of my math class—the smell was getting to me.” I made friends and enemies with people I didn’t even talk to. Now, with Facebook, I can relive this.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties: In which I plan my escape

The town of Lawrence, where I grew up, is considered by most as either the redheaded stepchild of Kansas or the state’s only merit. An abolitionist stronghold after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the streets at the center of town named after the New England states the settlers came from, it was burned to the ground in 1863 by a band of mercenaries and thugs led by William Quantrill. After the war, it then secured the University of Kansas (nearby Leavenworth got the federal prison) and is now called variously a progressive bastion and a refuge for aging hippies. Sometime before I started junior high, the Lawrence City Council decided, in the spirit of economic equalization, to bus the residents of lower-income North Lawrence, where I lived, to upper-middle-class Lawrence South Junior High School. My friend Adrian, with whom I used to compare the size of the cockroaches in our respective houses, was permanently scarred. He recently posted on Facebook that he still hates Swatch watches, as that was how the natives separated themselves from the imports. I looked at it differently. That bus commute was my underground railroad.

Against the Eighties: In which I'm busted

I was caught shoplifting, twice. After the first time, I ran away from home. After the second time, when I was caught on Vermont Street running away from the Ben Franklin with a Transformer under my shirt, I was locked in my room every day when I came home from school during the long, cold winter of 1987. Every book, cassette tape, or other item that could be considered entertaining was removed and placed in my parents’ closet. My mom let me out every weekday from 4:00-5:00, before Greg Proctor came home, and ask me how school was that day. It was my favorite hour of every day. She smuggled into my room the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King novels, and a series of fantasy novels involving a dwarf, a bear, and an otter. I hid them in the AC vents. Almost a decade later I stopped reading King, when he wrote The Shawshank Redemption. It was still a little too close to home.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties: In which I attempt to call my way into the musical mainstream

Like everyone else, I wanted my MTV. So much, in fact, that in the sixth grade I called their 900 hotline every morning to hear Martha Quinn’s prerecorded message about Def Leppard or Duran Duran or Madonna at 50 cents a call. After Greg Proctor saw the phone bill, I spent the summer before I started junior high with my four-year-old sister at the babysitter’s.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays just published!

I promise, the timing on this is purely coincidental. As I was editing the Further Reading section of The List and the Story I discovered, to my delight, that Wayne Koestenbaum's seminal "My '80s" is now the title essay of his just-released collection, My 1980s and Other Essays!

This Monday I had the pleasure of hearing him read from it at the Franklin Park Reading Series, and fell in love anew with that piece. Can't wait to read the rest, especially the essay on Debbie Harry, whose ubiquitous influence on the late Seventies/early Eighties continues to manifest itself in strange and wonderful ways on the survivors of said epoch.

On that note, I have to also recommend the wonderful Meagan Brothers' YA novel, Debbie Harry Sings in French , whose protagonist is an ostensibly straight teenage boy whose fixation with the Blondie chanteuse leads him to discover that he loves to sing Blondie songs in drag.

OK, not all  of the Eighties was so bad.

Against the Eighties: In which the fallout begins

Parts of The Day After were filmed in Lawrence when I was in the fourth grade. Greg Proctor fancied himself a makeup artist and was obsessed with slasher flicks of the time. But watching Kansas City destroyed in the movie broadcast, families I grew to love in the first half hour of the movie turned to skeletons in one blinding flash, I was terrified more than I was watching Scanners or I Spit on Your Grave or any of the other movies Greg Proctor made me sit through with him. After the movie was over, my mother called the hotline ABC had set up for people who were traumatized watching it, then locked herself in her room. Greg Proctor told me it was just TV, probably made by the communists in Hollywood. The following week, a girl in my class gave a presentation on her performance as an extra in the movie. She was one of the thousands of radiation victims in the scenes at the KU Medical Center. I remember being jealous of her, and not knowing why. Sometimes when I tell this story now, I say I was an extra in the movie.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Steven Church wrote an entire book on the fallout from his own experience watching The Day After  as a child in Lawrence, The Day After The Day After . You can read me interviewing him here. 

The List and the Story - Calvino's Invisible Cities just added to Further Reading

I just finished this wonderful book on the train this morning, and I'm still recovering. I added this to the Further Reading section of The List and the Story: 

I’m tempted to call this thoroughly unique work a list-novel, but then I think it’s better to call it a collection of OCD urban folktales. Gore Vidal said of it, “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.” Bearing in mind my Sisyphean task, I’ll simply say two things: 1) the basic premise is that the explorer Marco Polo is describing the cities he’s ostensibly visited to the Kublai Khan in the waning days of the latter’s empire, a total of 55 allegorical tales of cities that exist mostly in Polo’s mind, and in all of ours, fragmentary glimpses of cities that any urbanite will recognize in their own; and 2) Calvino arranges the stories with perfect symmetry: 9 sections, each beginning and ending with a conversation between Polo and the Khan and containing either 5 or 10 descriptions of individual cities, and the cities are categorized by topic (Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities), five named cities per topic, and arranged in each section in descending order, e.g., Cities and Memory 5 (Maurilia), Cities and Desire 4 (Fedora), Cities and Signs 3 (Zoe), Thin Cities 2 (Zenoba), Trading Cities 1 (Euphemia). The combination of the individual power of each mythic city and the rhythmic presentation of each in the fabric of the book leads the reader (me, at least) into a dream-like openness to the imagined experience of not only traveling to each city, but seeing each city as merely one facet of a larger City. Polo ostensibly saw his own Venice in each, I see my own New York. At one point in their conversations, the Khan tells Polo, “Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables?” And Polo replies, “This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”

Against the Eighties: In which my early running career begins and ends

Many times, when I was walking the street, I raced the cars that passed me. I made it my mission to keep up with a car until it turned onto another street or stopped. One day, after I’d chased a blue minivan all the way to my friend’s house, my friend’s older sister was on the porch. “Why do you do that? You know those people are laughing at you?” That was the end of my street racing career.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which we excavate rhetorical techniques from unlikely sources

While watching the Iran-Contra hearings, I learned a very important rhetorical strategy from Oliver North. “Did you mean to leave the store with this in your pocket?” I don’t recall. “SRS had three calls about domestic abuse in your household in the last month. Is there anything you want to tell us?” I don’t recall. “Who is your father again?”

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which we explore the animal kingdom

I spent much of the Eighties chasing, capturing, eating, domesticating, petting, and feeding animals. My grandparents’ grey tomcat, known only as Mister Cat, and my bulldog Sassy watched over me. My Uncle Harry had a parrot named Samson, and my Uncle Mike had a mynah bird named Coco. Samson only repeated “How’s it going?” and then bit me. Coco, short for Cocaine, was acquired in a drug deal, and his phrases were “Roll a joint!” in a high woman’s voice and “Co-co-co-cocaine” in a low baritone. Every Easter my grandparents bought about 200 chicks that we would chase and fondle, and I would cut their heads off, boil them, and pluck them in the fall. The seasons defined what I fished for—spring, crappie; summer, catfish; fall, stocked trout. I spent my winters alone in my room with my kingdom of animals I’d acquired that year, keeping them in cages and aquariums and imposing my own anthropomorphic moral code on them. If a crawdad, for instance, hurt another crawdad, I would boil it alive. If a snapping turtle crawled out of the aquarium, I would cut its head off.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which we digitize Burroughs

In 1981 William S. Burroughs moved to Lawrence. His life and my family’s intersected twice. The first time, he came to my house and threatened to shoot me for chasing his beloved cats in front of his house on Learnard Avenue. He knew my name by the t-shirts my grandparents had gotten me when I became John Proctor. The second was when he took up residence at my grandparents’ bungalow on Lone Star Lake. Every day, he rowed our old boat to the center of that muddy lake and convalesced. His manager bought it from my grandpa for $29,000. After Burroughs died, that bungalow was sold on eBay for $159,950.

Digitized from "Burroughs & Son," originally published in Numero Cinq , May 2010

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which the beast is slain

In the summer of 1988, Frank Donald Goodish was stabbed to death in a locker room shower  in Puerto Rico by Jose Huertas Gonzalez. Huertas had followed him into the shower with the knife concealed in a towel after telling Goodish he wanted to talk to him about a contract dispute. Both were professional wrestlers, and Huertas represented Carlos Colon, the commissioner of the World Wrestling Council, a Puerto Rican wrestling federation. Colon was nervous that Goodish was going to use his accumulated wealth to buy a stake in the WWC. Goodish had toured extensively through the United States and Japan, and was rumored to be looking to retire from active wrestling and invest in the Latin American wrestling market. After being stabbed, Goodish was reportedly left bleeding on the shower floor until his friend Tony Atlas, perhaps the only American wrestler at the venue, carried him to an ambulance. Goodish died during surgery, and Huertas was later acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers. Goodish’s stage name was Bruiser Brody.

Against the Eighties: In which we introduce the beast

For most of my childhood, my sole aspiration was to become a professional wrestler. Central States Wrestling was my Sunday morning service, Bulldog Bob Brown and “Freight Train” Rufus R. Jones were the disciples, and Sheik Abdullah the Great was the devil with his minions the Masked Grapplers. But the traveling preacher, the baddest of them all, perhaps the most popular cross-promotional wrestler of the time, was Bruiser Brody. He looked like a modern-day Genghis Khan, and was the only force for good who could stand up to the 400-pounds-of-pure-evil Abdullah the Butcher or even the 500-pound Kamala the Ugandan Giant. I never saw him lose a match.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

New Resident Dad post: Talking to Kids about God and Death

In addition to all the List and the Story stuff, I also wrote a piece this weekend for A Child Grows in Brooklyn, on talking to kids about death and god(s). Enjoy! 

Against the Eighties: In which we juxtapose wildly

I got most of my culture secondhand. "Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now" was David Lee Roth in Spandex before it was Emmett Miller in blackface. I knew every word Steven Tyler sang for Aerosmith, but still don't know one word Sinclair Lewis wrote in Arrowsmith. Xanadu was Olivia Newton-John in rollerskates before it was the castle that held Charles Foster Kane’s youth hostage.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which, if only for a moment, we get personal

The Eighties were a period of change for me. For instance, my name. I started the decade John Light, but in 1982, when I was nine years old, the municipal court of Lawrence, Kansas delivered me into the paternal custody of Greg Proctor, and my name became John Proctor. They even changed the name of the father on my birth certificate. I didn't know who my father before him was, and my mother had started having me call him Dad when I was five. My new grandparents bought me t-shirts with the words “My Name Is John Proctor” broadcast across the front and back.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which we begin the list and the story

Mike Watt, founding member of Eighties hardcore band the Minutemen, wrote a song in the Nineties titled “Against the 70’s” with a refrain of “The kids of today should defend themselves against the Seventies,” and a coda in which Watt almost wistfully croons, “Speakin’ as a child of the Seventies…” Speaking as a child of the Eighties, I’ve spent the rest of my life defending myself against them.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

The List and the Story: Against the Eighties starts this Monday!

OK, OK, so I have the first month mapped out - 21 segments, one for each weekday of September, of which there are conveniently 21. 

Each weekday morn I shall add a segment, each a self-enclosed little bit that I'll reveal via the blog and then add to Against the Eighties. Some will be include sound, photos, or video, and all will be brief (generally ranging anywhere from 25-200 words). I've tried to make them so that each segment and decade has its own logic, but also works off the other segments and decades.

Enjoy, friends. 

An oldie: "And the City Swallowed the Moon" on La Petite Zine, 2003

I was having dinner at my in-laws' tonight, and my mother-in-law was playing Yo-Yo Ma. I think she was trying to cleanse her palate, as I'd just been playing some Allman Brothers. Anyway, while half-listening I heard Ma playing something familiar - the haunting, beguiling sound of a Piazzolla tango.

I started on-again/off-again relationship with Astor Piazzolla through a Kronos Quartet's EP, "Five Tango Sensations," that I picked up in college. Each tango in the set is named for a human emotional state - Asleep, Loving, Anxiety, Despartar, Fear - and each has pervaded my personal mythology since.

Which leads me to a piece I wrote in the winter of 2000, my first winter in New York City. During this time I was doing a lot of staying out late and making a home of the city, mostly the free parts of it like parks, public commons, and mass transit. One sliver of that home-ness was given to me periodically on the 7 train, when I crossed paths with a blind old Argentinian fellow with an accordion who played tangos for cash. I wanted so bad to immortalize him in words - the longing in every squeeze of the accordion, the way his eyes drooped so much that he looked like he was asleep while playing, his deep baritone voice bellowing out between songs, "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ANY DONATIONS ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED." Then, one night, I did.

I wrote this, a sort-of poem written in loose blank verse, almost entirely while at the Queensboro Plaza train station on a brutally cold night. It's about many people and many things, but mainly it's about my early love affair with every soul of New York City. I read it aloud at many, many open mikes until, one fateful summer evening in 2001 while gallivanting across the Brooklyn Bridge with Daniel Nester and Ravi Shankar (the poet, not the sitar virtuoso), I mentioned the piece to them; Dan asked me to send it to him for consideration in his online La Petite Zine, and the rest is history.

I'd actually forgotten about the piece for the past few years, until my mother-in-law and Yo-Yo Ma jogged my memory. After digging it up, I've put up a link to it in my Ephemera section. I don't include this piece as Ephemera because I think it's ephemeral to my work in terms of content - it's actually one of my favorite pieces I've written - but because it's structurally so different from most anything else I've published.  

 "And the City Swallowed the Moon" on La Petite Zine