Tag: 1990’s

Dude Wore a Kimono

Part 1

We didn’t know it then, but at least we still had the glinty white sunlight of the 90’s to fall back on. I was 22, and it had been a while, a bit more than a year since I’d dropped out of college. I’d left to work at a stock footage archive. It was a cool job. Interesting. Fun. And my desk was tucked in amongst the rows of ¾ video cassettes and old timey film canisters. It was all mine too. I didn’t have to share it with anyone. But now I was quitting that gig. Quitting to move back in with my mother. I was leaving NYC, going to rural Massachusetts to get off drugs. Going to the tiny house I’d grown up in, in a small town north of Boston, because I could no longer keep it together. It was January and I was about to go cold turkey. I was about to try and kick my first real dope habit.

Continue reading “Dude Wore a Kimono”

Kurt Cobain was NOT a Retard Fucker!

Back in the 90’s, I nearly wore out my Aiwa boom box (along with its’ trademarked mega-bass-boost button) with the Melvin’s Houdini CD. The box was a rugged piece of equipment and I was convinced it would last forever. It followed me from my dorm room on Washington Square Park, to a tenement building on Avenue C, then across the country for an action packed-black-tar-filled sojourn on Haight Street. It only succumbed some years after my return to the student hellhole known as Allston Massachusetts. Despite the mileage, I’m convinced it was Houdini that ultimately did the mega-bass button in.

 Consider reading the first installment of a new fictional piece I am writing Kurt Cobain Lives In 1994 Kurt Cobain faked his own suicide. 22 years later he’s ending his self-imposed exile.

 

More to the point, my mind was blown when I was introduced to the Melvins. It was so heavy! The sound was so much darker than most of the heavy metal I was aware of at the time. It’s hard, but has a slippery tempo that makes it difficult to put your finger on, still guitar-based, but with drums and vocals used so differently from anything else I’d yet heard. It’s still vaguely punk, but fucking evil as well. I loved it! This was the shit you imagined destroying boom boxes, although truthfully that particular Aiwa boom box lasted longer than it had a right to.

Continue reading “Kurt Cobain was NOT a Retard Fucker!”

Christmas is Coming – Part 3

My walk from home to work, from Avenue C and 4th Street to 5th Avenue just below 23rd, takes a little more than a half an hour. It can be a real bitch of a walk, especially on a cold day like today. There’s no subway that helps to cut down the travel time in any substantial way, so I’m stuck hoofing it twice a day, every day, unless I spring for a cab, which I’ve done like… once, maybe. Continue reading “Christmas is Coming – Part 3”