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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Posterizing My Life

I think it is universal human experience that everyone who lives in the same town as their parents inherits stuff. Inherits crap, really. Initially you inherit your own crap, stuff from your childhood stored in your parents' attic. Eventually they run out of your crap and start to bring you their own. My father seems to do it by weight - the more something weighs, the less he can bear disposing of it. So a lot of these things come to me.

My father has a crate of electric motors that he has kept since his father died in 1977. They are monstrous, slightly smaller than bowling balls and improbably about 70 pounds a piece. His befuddled explanation is that they are "brand new", a painful spin on "they're useless and, as such, have never been used". He even admits he has no idea what someone might use them for. At one time he had every toaster the family owned over the past twenty-five years on shelves in the basement. Our family is unusually hard on toasters. My father has no particular talent for fixing appliances and indeed never tried, but could not throw them away because they are substantial - they're heavy and have a bunch of parts and are therefore valuable.

He once gave me a pair of depression-era hedge clippers which take two people to operate with the explanation "they're perfectly good hedge clippers". Except of course that modern technology has developed electric hedge clippers which weigh a quarter as much and can be operated by a single person and clip hedges in a fraction of the time. It wasn't that my father was insensitive to how these things might effect me - at the time I had no bushes or shrubs of any kind. Perhaps he intended me to use them on my cat.

So the other night my father comes over for dinner. Because we invited him. As is usual, he brings stuff. Crap, remember. All that stuff at the beginning of this blog was only to set the stage for how unhopeful I was when he handed me a big cardboard tube and said "I don't know what this is, but it has your name on it."

Greeeeeeeeaat.

I need to interject another biographical touchstone here, which was the fire. When I was a couple of years out of college, I lived in an apartment that burned down. Fortunately, the future DJ Magnet was unemployed and rescued my cat, but we all lost some percentage of what we owned. This is important because I never find it odd that certain physical shards of my life are missing. They probably went up in the fire.

After he left, I opened the tube and found a tremendous roll of posters, which I peeled off one at a time like a strip-tease for my wife's benefit. My wife has no sense of pop culture and so understood none of the posters and generally feels like I should strip less, anyway. So I guess it was for my benefit. Whatever.

The posters were a treasure trove of my teenage years. They all had tattered edges and had been bludgeoned repeatedly by tack holes, which means they will never be museum pieces. But I hope some museum somewhere has these things. Perhaps they were a part of your childhood, too.

I have a Cure Disintegration Tour poster. It's funny, I was recently opining that I wished I had seen the Pixies play in their prime owing to their legendary status, and had completely forgotten that they opened this show. And they sucked something awful. So there's no point in berating yourself if you missed that boat.

You probably didn't have an autographed Def Jef poster, but I did. "To the Hitman, One Love, Def Jef."

Public Enemy and Bauhaus had almost identical posters, black and white with the buildings of Manhattan towering over them. I remember that I had them on opposite sides of the room, imagining that the effect would be more subtle that way. Nobody commented, of course. I can't imagine more than a handful of people ever saw my room.

I have a Mission UK Deliverance Tour poster (May 3, 1990 at the Glenn Miller Ballroom in Boulder). And right below all of the pomp and circumstance of the Mission is the logo of their opening band, the Wonder Stuff. I had never heard the Wonder Stuff, but I learned a valuable lesson that night: do not EVER book an opening band that will completely blow you off the stage. For those of you familiar with their work, it was the Hup tour and they closed with "Goodnight, Though" which involved Miles Hunt screaming into the microphone through a megaphone while the world came down around him. What a show.

I had a Xavier McDaniel poster. McDaniel led the nation in points and rebounds for two consecutive years at Wichita State (the only Division I player to do it since then was the late, great Hank Gathers). When he got to the NBA, X was known more for his attitude. He would fight anyone, anywhere, any time for no good reason. Man, I loved that guy. He also carried the abysmal 1992 movie "Singles" with his cameo where he advises Campbell Scott's character in a daydream not to cum inside Kyra Sedgwick (excellent advice for us all, I'm sure). Oh, yeah - the caption on the poster? "The X-Man Cometh."

I had a poster from the Turn In, Tune On, Burn Out Tour, which was supposed to go off in the summer of 1991, the same summer as the first Lollapalooza. The Sisters of Mercy, Public Enemy, Warrior Soul and Gang of Four. The tour never happened, possibly because I was the only one who wanted to see it.

I had show posters. Plays I did in high school, a couple I did in college. Not shows I am nostalgic about, unfortunately. The best shows have no posters.

Finally, the piece de resistance, I have an LL Cool J World Tour poster. August of 1989 at the Denver Coliseum with (I am not making this up) NWA, De La Soul, Too Short and Slick Rick. This show never sold out, probably for the same reason I did not go, which was that the media at the time made it sound like a virtual certainty that anyone wearing the wrong colors at a rap show would be shot.

There were other posters, none of which meant as much as these. I pitched a couple, but mostly rolled them back up and put them lovingly in their tube. They were not thrity-five pound hedge clippers and I did not lose them in the fire and I will hold onto them forever and for always and while they may never be so fortunate as to see a wall again, it's a rare thing that can make a person smile like that.

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