coming 20
It's quite amazing, isn't it? This year it'll be 20 years since I was born. Solidarity (the political party) was legalised in Poland in 1989; the Exxon Valdez spilt; Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie; CFCs were phased out; people were massacred in Tiananmen Square; apartheid breathed its dying breath; and the Berlin Wall fell. 1989 was momentous.
-----
People were still using pagers and eating vanilla ice-cream; fridges were smaller, computers barely available and took ages to load MS-DOS, and how many channels were there on TV?
Cartoon Network wasn't around back then. (And I attribute the incredible stupidity of the post-1992-ish generation to the introduction of Cartoon Network around 1994, because watching TV just deadens the mind.) The CD drive wasn't around; neither were MP3 players.
Do you remember how Channel 5 always repeated Home Alone around Christmas? I think I watched it 4 or 5 times before I got immensely bored and gave up hope on TCS.
And shopping malls were like... Parkway (which still exudes an irresistable draw on my soul due to the happy confluence of Coffee Bean, Borders and Gramophone) and Thompson Plaza (which does not, due to the fact that it sucks, now).
-----
I can hardly imagine what it'd have been like to be 20 in 1989. Or what it'd be like to go back 20 years and try living with what we had. There was a striking sketch on the Mitchell & Webb Situation called "The Early 1990s House" - a couple living with only the stuff there was in the early 1990s; at the end of the episode the wife broke down when there was only neapolitan ice-cream. It actually became psychologically distressing.
Somehow my childhood was nothing as deprived as that. Or maybe it was but I never noticed. But I think I had a much more healthy and stimulating childhood than kids these days.
-----
In many ways 1989 was a year of hope - both the hope of a better, kinder, juster, more human world, and the blind but inextinguishable and sacred hope of a baby me. Somehow both hopes have been much diminished, moderated by the passing of years.
But I guess it must mean something when both these hopes refuse to die.
Labels: Life
posted by Unknown at
10:45 pm
3 Comments:
Are you kidding? Cow and Chicken was THE driving intellectual force of the 90s. Half of what we now call modern thought would not exist were it not for Cow and Chicken.
adam
Oh yeah I forgot about Cow & Chicken... That was solid awesomeness with icing on top. But nowadays, TV programmes just turn brains to slush. Nothing like the old days.
blerg the exxon valdez spill was on the day i was BORN D: also haha i remember thomson plaza used to have a yaohan and my sister went to tumble tots there :P pretty boring mall but i like it anyway for nostalgic reasons.
also! i think cartoon network was pretty good back in the days when they still showed hanna-barbara cartoons, yo (jetsons, flintstones, all the handdrawn stuff). the old batman cartoons and stuff were pretty good too. then everything became computer animated and weird and i didn't like cartoon network anymore too x)
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home