Jun 20 2008
One Crazy Summer
As I’ve already written about elsewhere, I consider the summer of 1994 something like the high water mark of my New Yawkahness. It was the summer the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and also the summer that the “broken windows” policing of the Giuliani administration really started making itself felt in the everyday life of the Outer Boros. Around our way in Queens, we had two young ballbuster cops, named Brockman and Malone, who replaced a small middle-aged patrolman we called Officer Turtle, who used to sit down with us while we were drinking beer and ask us about the neighborhood, a real 1950′s model. As of June 1994, that was all over. Brockman and Malone handed out desk appearance tickets for just about anything, and threatened us with far worse for even minor infractions (“in the park after dark” and other such nonsense violations). They were notorious; my friend V. made a techno song about them.
This change really resulted in a kind of general euphoria, an early fin-de-siecle, wherein everything sort of felt like it was coming to an end. You also had the birth of new hip hop behind Biggie and the Wu; the soundtrack to that summer was nothing if not 36 Chambers and Ready to Die, thumping out of every car and inundating every keg party, sometimes competing with the awful “Far Behind” by Candlebox. And, of course, it culminated in Woodstock 94, a fucking mess, like a hazy question mark on the whole thing. Whenever I go home and hang out with guys I grew up with, talk always turns to that summer; it struck us all, I think, as a real transition moment, from one kind of life to the next (indeed, I never lived at home another summer after that…)
So, now, I see the buzz all over for The Wackness, a new comedy that’s doing its best to hype itself as “the new Juno.” Of course, I must add to this buzz in order to discuss it – this is the condition of speech in what a professor I know likes to call just-in-time capitalism. In any case, The Wackness is set in New York in the summer of 1994, and features the travails of a teenage drug dealer and his therapist (who he pays with pot, I take it). I guess I’m not the only one with the nostalgia. The marketing material has an obvious graffiti aesthetic (although they really could have got somebody to do some better graffiti, I think), and a top-notch soundtrack that gets a particular version of 90′s New York just about right. I guess I’ll have to see it when it comes out, but I suspect the Manhattan version of that summer (a fucking therapist?) is a bit different than what we were seeing in Queens and Brooklyn. See trailer here…
And 1995 is the last year I bought vinyl… or anything really because I Indie Rock appeared co-opted by the big labels, some of the small labels had already been bought, and I was getting tired of caring about what I was supposed to like.
And Cobain died in 1994. We were in a recession not as bad as the one now, but almost, 2008 is like 1994 but worse in many ways (following the first and second Gulf wars), and in the summer of 1994 I had just graduated without of clue like a character out of Kicking and Screaming (1995), Reality Bites (1994)… and the movie Kids (1995). The grrrl-comrade keeps asking me to finish my short story about 1995… sorry, just adding my riff….
However, the trailer for The Wackness doesn’t look good to me. Why? Seems like a angst-ridden-geeky-white-boy fantasy. After Harold and Kumar, how can we go back to that?
but I’ll see it just cuz of Olivia Thirlby… she so pretty…
I didn’t say it looked good…
um, I’m a whiteboy, i was angst ridden in 1994 and i had lotysa fantasy…we are definitely not we………boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
[...] The Wackness – Almost a year ago, I wrote about The Wackness before seeing it, tying it back to my own memory of that crazy New York summer of 1994. We finally [...]