Redartz: Welcome to our little Bronze age sharing session for the first week of November! Here in the US of A we (or most of us, anyway) just changed our clocks back for Daylight Savings Time. Not sure that it saves much, but there it is. As we await our first hardy responder with a topic for the week, let's think a bit about time. Did time in your youth seem more plentiful, or did school and other responsibilities eat it up like work in adulthood? Did you find it tough to fill your time, or did you never have enough of it? Were you aware of the overall pop cultural time frame in which you lived, or was it just Tuesday? What say we 'kill some time' and chat.
18 comments:
This rich guy in Elkhart, Indiana built a massive "Hall of Heroes" museum as a tribute to the Justice League. It is now a museum open for tourists!
A link to "The Hall of Heroes" is below.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-superhero-museum-elkhart-20190926-qeu2fcledbaqlakcyyvbplyroi-story.html
Anyhow, you got a ton of dough... what do you do with it? Or, to stay focused, what do you do that's comic related with it???
(Why do I have this strange idea of Human Belly HB buying a cyrogenically frozen Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno and adding to his "All things Hulk" room? LOL!)
Red - Great questions!
I think I became aware of epochs in time in the 70s due to Happy Days and Sternako's History of Comics.
I mean, I knew I was living in the 60s and 70s but they were measured against the 30s, 40s, and 50s. (There was no life before the Great Depression? Of course, but it was so distant probably because there was no significant amount of video to capture it?)
But for me, getting back to a 6-hour time difference with the UK (they switched clocks a week before us) meant I get to listen to their same "Talk Sport" radio show driving to work again! I listen live, since it is radio also streaming over the net. Charlie loves soccer and they speak English in the UK more/less and I get my dose on the way to work!
Yeah I think there's always a slight lag between decades, so you could say the 60s didn't really end till around 1973, and the 70s spilled over into the first couple years of the 80s before the "hooray for capitalism/greed is good" philosophy took over. I remember the late 70s, but I was just a kid at the time so it didn't really leave a mark.
Here in Saskatchewan, we don't change our clocks, but because (almost) everywhere else does, all the TV shows are now on an hour later. it always takes me a while to adjust.
Hmmm-- The assumption is that beloved, departed Mr. Bixby isn't already in an independently-powered little secret chamber down there. . . ? (Mr. Ferrigno may have been quick to point out, "I'm not dead yet"--- and demonstrated the fact by bestowing several head-thwams to ceiling upon the asker. . . )
For real-- a bit of a dream-project of mine (having the said-proposed funds) would be to create and produce a stage-adaptation of Austin Grossman's "Soon I Will Be Invincible". The book has an inherently theatrical feel to it-- perhaps the intimacy of the parallel storytellers? And it feels like it would slide wonderfully into a fairly-conventional two-person format. Given time, money, and permission--- that's probably a project I would love to give life to.
HB
I was definitely aware that I was an '80's kid. I thought the '70's were dirty and ugly (bellbottoms, grrr!). Then in the '90's all that came back in a way, and now the kids are back wearing 'mom jeans.' I suspect that it's this recurrence in fashion, and also the difficulty in defining the 'aughts' that have really eroded the decimalization of time for me. Also, working on college campuses all my adult life (I went to college ... and stayed) there's a lot of flux, change, and return, so it all tends to muddle at this point.
One thing I definitely hated when I was younger though was the valorization of the '60's, particularly in music. Unfortunately, it's now happening with the '80's. Seriously, when I'm grocery shopping and the store starts piping in the Clash and the Specials it just makes me feel like a sad, middle-aged consumer rather than lifting me away on a euphoric wave of nostalgia.
Happy Guy Fawkes, Colin, and cheers all!
I'm with you Selenarch... I go into the Trader Joe's and sometimes I feel like I'm in my frat house in the early 80s: it's like non-stop New Wave and British Synth (Cyndy Lauper to Human League to Robert Palmer to Level 43 to ...).
I really dig it, but I realize that they're playing for a reason.
Man, it seems like we're taking pop quizzes here in the past few weeks with all of these questions. Didn't fell up to responding yesterday, as it seems I'm coming down with something and had a doozy of a headache most of the day.
Anyway, *heavy sigh* here goes:
1. Did time in your youth seem more plentiful, or did school and other responsibilities eat it up like work in adulthood?
It did seem more plentiful to me; we all may have complained about school-work, but it tended be manageable so that I had enough time for leisure activities, like reading, watching some TV and, later, going out with friends. I think it was only as I got deeper into college that the workload made it seem like 24 hours in a day just wasn't enough.
2. Did you find it tough to fill your time, or did you never have enough of it?
Again, before college, I was able to strike a balance. Even though I may have sometimes complained when I was still in grade school, I never recall being *genuinely* bored. Also, if it seemed like I had nothing to do, either of my parents would find some kind of chores for me - we lived on a 12-acre piece of land, so there were things like mowing the lawn, picking fruit from the many trees on our property, weeding the garden, feeding the chickens (and sometimes other livestock) and helping my then self-employed dad in his machine shop (mainly stuff like sweeping the floor and oiling the machinery).
3. Were you aware of the overall pop cultural time frame in which you lived, or was it just Tuesday?
Hm, I suppose, back in the '70s, when I was still a preteen, that I kind of had some idea that we were in the 'disco era.' I was aware of the 1950s and 1960s as these specific eras with their own character early on, thanks to TV shows like Happy Days and all of the related '50s nostalgia, and the recently concluded (yep, about 1973-ish) '60s. A lot of hippies, then folks already pushing 30 or more, were still around. And yeah, when I did hit my teens, I starting to perceive the '80s as a separate thing, the Reagan era and so forth.
Of course, as a kid, when I thought of the 1950s in particular, it seemed like something deep in the past, but then in the 1990s, when I was in my twenties, and I saw that first wave of '70s nostalgia, it hit me that to the first-wave boomers who were waxing nostalgic during the actual 1970s, the 1950s probably seemed like yesterday.
4. (..) you got a ton of dough... what do you do with it? Or, to stay focused, what do you do that's comic related with it?
O.k., since doing something actually altruistic is off the table, something that occurred to me on a number of occasions when doing this thought experiment - and in light of the fact that sometimes Kickstarter campaigns are launched for this very purpose - is bringing together original creators to finish up some of their dangling stories they way they wanted. Obviously, this refers to series and characters owned by the Big Two or some other company, so the money, besides paying the creators handsomely, would also be used to pay lawyers to smooth out all of the legal matters. For example, this would mean giving Don McGregor the opportunity to finish the Black Panther vs. the Klan story, or John Byrne the Last Galactus story. The obvious problem is that now so many of these creators are no longer with us. For example, ideally the Black Panther story I mentioned would be drawn by Rich Buckler and/or Billy Graham, both now deceased. I would have loved to see the Omega story concluded as its original creators wanted, but of them (Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney) only Skrenes is still around. Similarly, I would have liked to see what Gerber would have done with Mr. Miracle as well, but alas.
I had to shorten my comment above, as blogger told me it was too long. See? Too many damn questions! :P
Anyway, the rest of my response to the last question:
If nothing else, I would throw down the cash to get the fifth issue of the Cat finished (i.e., colored) and published. It was scripted, and most if not all of the art has been done - and if not, well, Romana Fradon is still around. Yep, that's right, Fradon did the art for a Marvel book, and except for some scans of pages floating around on the internet, it's never seen the light of day in proper form.
And by the way HB, interesting that you mentioned "Soon I Will be Invincible." That's yet another of the many books sitting on my to-read pile. I really need to get to it...
Wait a minute--- that Hall of Heroes is on Cassopolis St?? I just checked it out-- I used to drive right past that spot (several decades ago) to get to the RV factory I worked for (for a short time). . . hunh, and I worked part-time at the McDonald's that's about a mile up the road--- (these were concurrent jobs, in fact. Talk about yer time bein' filled--!)
From the website, it looks like a GIANT Comic Book room, it does-!
HB
If you read the Chicago Tribune article, the guy's wife divorced him b/c he put her car out of the garage to put Tony Stark's in, from one of the Iron Man movies, lol.
As you know, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, with the infernal Chinook Winds, that is like "snow belt ground zero."
Perhaps that's "one collectible too far???"
Charlie, your comment there evokes a very specific memory from an era (Late 70's-- specifically the Blizzard of '78) in that region (SW Michigan-- South Bend/Misawaka/Elkhart area). The HUGELY popular "cool" vehicles-of-choice that were ABUNDANT even in our little town were those low-riding Trans-Ams, Firebirds, Corvettes, and the Datsun Z-26/28's. Pretty much THE cars to lust after in the late 70's. And all of them absolutely worthless in the completely typical Lower Lake winters, as a 4" snowfall could leave them stuck, and the shallowest of slippery inclines could leave them foundering at the bottom. They also were perfectly proportioned to be the point of a low, gentle snow-drift-- and they would flippin' vanish in heavier storms.
Heh--
HB
Good Grief HB... I have way too many experiences like that, lol: Cool cars absolutely useless when the Suzy Snowflace showed up dressed in her snow white crown!
. . . Oh lordy, our Ford LTD sedan. . . when I was a barely-competent newly-licensed driver, at that. It could fish-tail while dead-stopped if the wind was blowin' hard enough. . . SO MANY ditches I veered that thing into. . . Neighbors would pull their sledding kids onto the porch. . .
HB
I just have to say, that Elkhart, Indiana guy is my hero!
No kidding, db. That's quite a monument. What I found extra interesting was that it was dedicated to mostly DC heroes from what I can tell. It's a nice change from "Excelsior!"
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