Attack of the Black 80s

The problem with iPod earbuds is that not only are they uncomfortable, they have this property of broadcasting quite clearly all of the treble registers of your music to everyone in your immediate environment. So it sorta sounds like a mosquito carrying a miniature boom box. And is about as irritating for everyone that's not you.

This morning's earbud special was a lengthy trip to the Black '80s, a magical time from about 1985-1993 when R&B was less about booty booty butt and more about insanely peppy synthesizer layered over beatbox (no real instruments here, kids), some guy named Christopher Reid popularized a haircut tall enough to qualify as a skyscraper, Bobby Brown's testicles hadn't descended yet but he still had the nerve to have a perogative, Michael Jackson was still sorta black but heading quickly towards high yellow, no one knew DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's real names, and Whitney Houston hadn't yet fucked up her singing voice with too much cocaine. Everyone wore shoulder pads, florescent pink and jungle prints, sometimes in the same outfit, and the hair... well, lest pictures of me in fifth and seventh grades come back to haunt me, it's best if I don't say much about the hair other than there was at least one inexplicable Patrick Nagel-esque print hanging in the window of every black beauty shop.

Anyway, this flashback was provided courtesy of some white chick sitting several seats in front of me on the bus with possibly neither the good sense to turn her iPod down (thust treating everyone to Whitney declaring that she will always love yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooou) or the hearing capacity to listen to it at a reasonable volume. I have to wonder if she's doing an ethnomusicology project... and I suddenly have this insane urge to watch Coming to America and Cosby Show reruns.

RIP Louis Rukeyser

Louis Rukeyser, the source for many Americans' stock-market knowledge for more than a generation, died of cancer on Tuesday in Greenwich, CT at the age of 73. The always dapper and pun-loving Rukeyser hosted Wall $treet Week With Louis Rukeyser on PBS from 1970-2002, then moved to CNBC in 2002 when Maryland Public Television attempted to revamp the show. Eighteen months later, Rukeyser said that doctors had found cancer in his back while performing surgery and that he had selected several substitutes to sit in for him while he recovered. He never did, and a year later he shut down the show. New York Daily News columnist Kay Gardella once said of him that he had "popularized a subject once considered too dull to print, let alone broadcast. He gives you just enough, gets to the heart of the matter quickly and keeps your interest at a peak. He's a broadcasting dynamo and has become the economic guru of the industry."

Unless you actively have an interest in business and finance, or like me, didn't really give a rat's ass but had a dad who did, you don't know who this guy is. Dad and I had a tradition of fighting over the living room TV that night because he wanted to watch such "boring" things as Washington Week in Review and Wall $treet Week and I wanted to watch Urkel. But really, Wall $treet Week was part of my Friday long before that... the theme (the classical one with all the french horn, not the techno version they have now) is pretty much nailed into my unconscious, and I remember even as a kid liking the choreographed montage of footage taken around downtown Manhattan that accompanied it. And then there was this ageless guy in an uncomfortable looking chair that looked nice enough except for the snow white hair that harkened back to the coiffure of George Washington that I've been insisting to my father since the age of 8 was a hairpiece, which, to my grade school mind, was the ultimate statement of insincerity.

Rest in Peace, Louis Rukeyser. I may still not find the ins and outs of the stock market fathomable or interesting, but you were very much a part of my Friday nights growing up as watching too many sitcoms and talking to harinezumi until 2am, and for that I thank you... and hope you are buried with that god-awful toupee.