March 16, 2010
As a boy, I really liked the smell of gasoline. I told my mother this, and I seem to remember her launching into a lecture that touched on the evils of speedballs and the career choices of Chevy Chase. She had little to worry about. I was too much of a prude to end up behind a Mobil station with a paper bag and Ruth Stoops. And no, I was never going to hit up my man Sherwin Williams for the Burnt Sienna and then move on to the darker stuff.
Kids these days (and of days past) are gutsier than I was. Or stupider. Or both. In any case, they huff. Proof: The New York Daily News ran a story about “Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome” a few days back.
What bugs me about this story isn’t that I don’t think huffing is a problem. I do. Not a huge one, but still a problem. It’s the word syndrome that gets me. How is this a syndrome? Now I understand that they’re making a case for the fact that adolescents’ lungs are more susceptible to the dangers of inhalants. But kids are susceptible to all sorts of dangers and it’s not just because of their delicate lungs. It’s because of their junior varsity brains.
In my formative years, my friends and I could have suffered from any of the following:
- Backfired Bottle Rocket Syndrome
- Ill-Advised Construction Site Trespassing Syndrome
- Helmetless Bicycle Stunts in Traffic Syndrome
- “I Can Definitely Jump Off Of That” Syndrome
By calling these things syndromes, it gives us all a laugh, but it also distracts from what they really are. They are stupid decisions. It would be naive of me to say that you can stop kids from making stupid decisions. And I’m not a parent. So I won’t offer parenting advice. But I will ask the powers that be (or the Daily News, at least) to stop pathologizing stupid decisions. That way, when I do become a parent, I don’t have to sit in a pediatrician’s office, thumbing through a pamphlet that says: So Your Kid Tried Sniffing Glue? There’s A Pill For That!
No Comments | Posted by Aaron under Death | Bookmark or Share
March 10, 2010
For those of us who came of age in the late 80s, celebrity death is a bit of a sport. We’re the ones who came up with Death Pools. We’re the ones who let VH1 morph from soft rock oasis to drugged out rock-star confessional to C-List romper room. So when Corey Haim died last night, twitter was afire with tributes to Lucas and The Lost Boys and, of course, much of it was drenched in sarcasm. I don’t really have a problem with that. Haim must have known he hasn’t been taken seriously in more than 20 years. Still, I’m going to resist cracking wise about “The Coreys” or Snowboard Academy. To me, Haim was a kid who carried a few films on his charisma, then pulled off the trick of tiptoeing along the edge of Hollywood. Partly because my generation’s love of snark allowed him to stay marginally relevant. Partly because it was all his talent and personal issues afforded him. And yes, he died far too young.
Then there’s Andrew Koenig. When he was found dead a couple weeks ago, “Boner Stabone” was lighting up the web too. His Growing Pains role was a one-note performance, but it was arguably the only funny thing in that show. Koenig never reached Haim’s level of fame, but he evidently fell just as hard. I would venture to guess that few of us had thought about him in eons until we learned of his disappearance and death. Yet his friends and family miss him dearly, and that’s a legacy we should all hope to have. The word boner may even make his loved ones giggle like the rest of us, but it probably also makes them wistful. Andrew created something.
In the mid 90s, when I was collegiate, dorms were dotted with a poster that depicted the dead 60s rock icons Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Jim Morrison. “We All Shine On,” it proclaimed. It didn’t matter whether the poster was the masterpiece of some aging idealist or some young marketing whiz. It worked. It forced the Boomers’ cultural-superiority onto us so-called Gen-X slackers. “Bow down, cause it don’t get any better than this kids,” it said, and we bought into it. I won’t argue about whether buying into it was justified, but I don’t know if a similar poster of Tupac, Kurt Cobain, and Jeff Buckley would be as ubiquitous these days. Not because each man hasn’t been lionized in his own right, but because we 30-somethings don’t always peddle our nostalgia through music. We peddle it through the fringe characters of pop culture, the one- or two-hit wonders, the comfortably mockable. Corey Haim. Andrew Koenig.
Ramsey, Handleman and Stabone is one of the many band names I cooked up years ago when I should have just been learning to play guitar. A pal and I imagined it to be some sort of prog-rock performance piece, with the three leads dressed as sitcom second fiddles: Dudley Ramsey from Diff’rent Strokes, Skippy Handleman from Family Ties, and Boner Stabone from Growing Pains. The album cover would, of course, consist of the “We All Shine On” image, reconfigured with the faces of Dudley (Jimi), Skippy (John) and Boner (Jim). It was perfection on all levels, but it never got past the idea stage. Ideas and action don’t always shake hands in my world.
Part of me still wants to see that album cover, maybe even put Haim in the Handleman slot. It might be in bad taste, given the circumstances. The joke was originally about worshiping false idols and the death of careers, not about actual death. Yet there’s a reason why we’re talking about theses guys. Honoring them for their acting is a fine thing, but we have to admit what we really liked about them. They were easy targets. They were goofy punching bags. Their existence made us chuckle. They were icons of a sort.
No Comments | Posted by Aaron under Celebrity, Death, Music | Bookmark or Share
