womanhouse asked: JNCO jeans, personalized license plates, maslow's hierarchy of needs, recumbent bikes, musicians turned actors, actors turned musicians, clarinet music in popular culture, your future epitaph.
My father first became aware of JNCO jeans sometime in the mid-1990s. We were at an amusement park, probably King’s Island in Cincinnati, and some teenagers walked by, with their pants dragging around their ankles. “Pants haven’t been that big since the ’70s,” he pointed out. This particular turn of phrase still holds some weird resonance with me. “Pants haven’t been that big since the ’70s” is one of those non-sequiter phrases I mutter to myself in public occasionally, when I can’t think of anything else to say. Wikipedia tells me “JNCO” stands for “judge none, choose one.” This makes a great deal of sense to me, actually. It’s a phrase you can use to discourage rash, spontaneous, Internet-like judgement. Someone says something you find vaguely distasteful, but not to the point where it merits an argument from you. “Well,” you might say, “pants haven’t been that big since the ’70s.” Then you might add: “As the old saying goes.”
“What old saying?” the other person says.
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I saw one last month that said “BLK4U” while going to the airport, at 5:00 in the morning. I got kind of upset, because I couldn’t figure out what it meant, and it seemed somehow in poor taste. We passed the driver, and it was a short white woman.
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For me? Self-transcendence. Just kidding. My apartment is too unclean for me to be anywhere above “safety.”
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I don’t see the attraction personally, but as a person who is very proud of his own bike-hewn calves and thighs, I don’t necessarily mind the parade of middle-aged bike-hewn calves and thighs— male, mostly — clad in spandex right at eye-level on the Greenway as recumbent cyclists pass me by. I’ve never seen anyone younger than 40 on a recumbent bike, and it’s a pleasant peek into a potential future, ten or fifteen or thirty years from now, where my calves and thighs retain their bike-hewn quality. The recumbents put calves and thighs right upfront, in the spotlight, and the 45-year-old men that ride them around must know this.
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The best musician-turned-actor is John Lurie. Although Justin Bieber did a nice job getting shot to death on that cop show. And actually, it’s fun to watch those terrible old Alan Freed quickie exploitation “rock ‘n’ roll” movies from the ’50s where Chuck Berry is hanging around the sidelines for some reason, making smart-ass comments every five minutes or so. “We ought to sign this kid, huh?” says Alan Freed. “Whatever you say, man,” says Chuck. “I genuinely believe Chuck Berry genuinely doesn’t care about what’s going on on-screen,” you the viewer say. You can’t fake that sort of nonchalance.
There has never been an actor that turned into a musician I’ve had any use for.
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The best use of a clarinet in pop music is, unquestionably, Michael Zager’s “Let’s All Chant,” from 1978 (the late ’70s being, of course, the golden age of cults and attendant cult-like chanting). The clarinet doesn’t come out until the middle somewhere, but that’s what makes it such a surprise — like when you’re chanting, and the leader of your cult mysteriously appears in the compound halfway through, and it’s a big surprise, and everyone in the cult is excited the cult leader has appeared. The harpsichord is a nice touch, too.
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“Let’s all chant.” Or, “Pants haven’t been this big since the ’70s.”
