It's Not the Way You Look, It's Not the Way That You Smile


Last night we went to the King's Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio.  It's 50 years old this year.  We didn't go into the park itself though:  there's an amphitheater on the grounds called Timber Wolf.  We went in a side entrance to see A Flock of Seagulls and Berlin there.  But still the experience was all drenched in this creepy stomach-ache nostalgia about the 70s and 80s and King's Island and people who go to King's Island.  The vast parking lot, the skyscraping rides and screams, smells of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and fried food.  

Walking up to the front of the place I got weirded out, time-traveling back to when going here was like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.  Just thinking about it back then was hypnotic.

Now of course it is something else.

Nostalgia is something that unplugs you from your surroundings in a mostly beautiful way.  It isolates your feelings around the past, gives those feelings back to you in one scary-sweet package.  And we got double-nostalgia from not only revisiting the Island of Kings, but also because we were sitting on a stainless bench watching 80s bands and the people who come to 80s band shows, all of that fusing into an overall trance.  The amphitheater was not even half-filled though.  And A Flock of Seagulls were much better than Berlin.  Terri Nunn tried very hard, but she was playing to a full house, and it wasn't full, so the whole situation was just sad, almost poetically so.  

But A Flock of Seagulls, playing to the small crowd -- they seemed right at home, and their anthemic songs have outlived the flashy hair and spandex and that splotchy "I Ran" video where they stand in front of multiple shoddy mirrors playing their synths and drums and guitars.  Their songs are hymns sort of now.

Lead singer Mike Score did a beautiful job crooning one of my favorite terribly beautiful synth-pop songs of all time:  "Wishing."  Its stalkery lyrics and fade-in-fade-out synths, its optimistic loser finesse, all of that reminded me of how outside of everything I felt as a kid.  And that, merged with the silhouettes of all the rides, and the screams as people slid back down to earth, all of that was worth everything. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best of...

Image
Wanted to pull together the little movie reviews I do on Facebook into one post, a "best-of" from last year.  By the way, these little things are like crosswords for me.  I love trying to compress all I feel about each movie into a tiny paragraph/package.  It's like making a poem.  Every word has to count, every feeling justified.   So here are movies from 2023 I truly loved haiku-ing about:  MAY/DECEMBER:  One of the the best movies of 2023 from what I can tell.  MAY DECEMBER is slippery and arch and gentle and crazy and cinematic and trivial and just incredible.  Todd Haynes has worked for 30 years to get this elegant and this primal.  He planted the seed with SAFE back in 1995 with the divine and even diviner now Julianne Moore:  satire pulsing with tenderness, mean-spirited glazed irony with a sad exhausted loving soul at the center.  This one takes its cue from tabloid lives but then uses all of it to inspire a sort o...
Read more

Perfect Day

Image
For a while now, art hasn't meant a lot to me.  Think it has something to do with the Pandemic and Trump and post-Trump and social-media and my age and just a total new feeling inside my heart and head that art, whether it is capitalized or not, isn't really worth it.  Doing or seeing.  Plus a couple of my best friends have passed away.  So there's that.  But still something about this era of polarization and dialog flaming into monolog and all the things -- something has evaporated culturally.  Art and life have disconnected in a lot of ways, and when they do connect it often feels manneristic and self-serving and just plain, well, worthless.   All of the above sounds particularly melodramatic I know, but I don't want melodrama.  I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.  I'm perfectly fine.  But I do just want to say:  art has sort of become an old acquaintance that I once had a deep crush on, but now when I come across ...
Read more

One of Those

Image
  Some movies have a potency built inside them that can't be unpacked with words or even thoughts. They just have it somehow, and it's not plot or cinematography or even performance that sends a film into this territory: it's a tone inherent in the subject matter maybe, and how the actors and everyone else take that subject matter on and hold it so dearly in their hearts and brains that the movie they make together becomes bigger than what they even thought they could accomplish. Like kindred souls combining into a mutual dream caused by honoring what they love. The Last Showgirl is one of those. The plot, about the last days of a showgirl's professional life on the Vegas strip, kind of feels a little cliche, reminiscent of other loser movies like The Wrestler or The Whale , but Pamela Anderson's face and demeanor and glow (as she portrays Shelly, the main character) make you take all that back. In fact, her face is the plot of The Last Showgirl :  wan, wrinkled, s...
Read more