THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 27 October 17,1996

 

 

 

In an effort to combat Corporate America’s appropriation of sports terms (you know, “teams”, “coaching”, etc.) (and you also know when the chips are down you’re gonna want Herb Brooks or Gino Gasparini leading you and not some management guru waving some New Age / Maslow crap around), I’m encouraging everybody to use as many sports terms and clichés as they can on a daily basis. For instance: you can’t stop Wyman, you can only hope to contain him.

 

SPORTS ON TV

 

Game Five of the National League Championship Series and it’s the top of the first and Willie McGee and Brian Jordan miscommunicate in the outfield and the ball drops between them. On the Fox broadcast Tim McCarver views the replay and says “communication breakdown” and I’m sitting there thinking c’mon Tim finish it c’mon say it you know you want to and then McCarver says “drive you insane” and we both felt better.

 

KILLING TIME

 

I’ve been at Big Finance for about eight weeks now, and last week it just hit me: I have never heard anyone mention a band, an artist, a song, a movie, a TV show, college football, college hockey, NHL hockey, etc. (i.e. real stuff.) In fact, nobody really talks about anything except their tasks at hand. Maybe Big Finance has come up with a miracle drug they circulate through the stale air in the building that makes their workers forget the outside world. But a few weeks back I heard somebody say the word “beer.” Then last week I heard one guy say “baseball.” And last Friday the same guy was talking about college football. He and I have been talking about baseball the last couple of days, which is cool. It should be noted that he’s a temp like me, so he probably hasn’t been exposed to their mind control techniques as long. Today, the finance department manager approached me and talked a little bit about college football. I mostly kept my mouth shut because A) she’s probably a mole trying to figure out who’s been talking about Life on the Outside the past couple weeks, and B) she’s a California Girl blonde babe who always wears miniskirts and pumps so I was pretty much speechless.

 

MOVIES

 

A few weeks back I was channel surfing on a weekend afternoon, and I came upon Pretty in Pink. Those John Hughes movies always bothered me (The Breakfast Club excluded, I guess.) The kids in these flicks went to some high school where all the kids listened to some imported dance music made by some mopey dance bands that existed only on MTV.

 

Yeah, Wyman, you’re saying...but the kids in the Hughes movies lived in Chicago, a big city, and you went to high school somewhere up in bumfuck Nodak so what the hell do you know? Not all teenagers listened to your preferred brand of meat-and-potatoes rock ‘n’ roll! And I respond by pointing out that the best teen movie of the eighties, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, had Jeff Spicoli talking about the Stones and hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party. Plus Brad Hamilton wore a Springsteen tee-shirt! And Mark Ratner played Led Zeppelin in his sister’s van. All of those rockers were big in my high school. And the second-best teen movie of the eighties, River’s Edge, had a soundtrack made up of almost all Slayer! Who I didn’t listen to in high school, but the movie came out four years after I was out of high school and I was listening to Metallica and Megadeth by then and that has gotta count for something.

 

So those Hughes Movies Bands... by the end of the eighties they were all answers to Where Are They Now trivia questions. The kids here in the Midwest (the same kids who make or break bands, no matter what the coastal folks say) want their rock ‘n’ roll to have some swagger, ya know? Their music should also have some guitars and drums and some semblance of danger. So those wussy bands with their collars turned up and their prettyboy haircuts are long forgotten, along with almost all the stars of those movies. Notice that almost no one from John Hughes’ precious trilogy of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink still has a movie career? Molly Ringwald is in some sitcom, so is Judd Nelson, and so was Jon Cryer when he was last seen. Anthony Michael Hall bulked up and tried to be a bad guy in Edward Scissorhands, but that was years ago. Emilio Estevez makes Mighty Ducks movies - hey he’s still in cinema! Where Ally Sheedy is, I have no idea.

 

Another thing that bugged me about the Molly Ringwald trilogy was that apparently John Hughes found her attractive. When those movies were out, I thought she was maybe okay looking. So now when I see those flicks, I think “hey I’m older and not so hung up on looks - betcha I’ll appreciate Molly now” and she still doesn’t do it for me. I still like the blonde bitches in gym class better.

 

But back to Pretty in Pink - (which was basically Sixteen Candles redone and not as funny and Jon Cryer not being as good as a geek as Anthony Michael Hall) James Spader’s character was such a pompous asshole. He always had on such rich kid clothes and no socks and was so contemptuous of just about everybody. He ruled! And Spader still has a viable movie career going. Right before I was watching this, I was thinking about Spader and how we need a movie where he’s an asshole again. He’s so good at it. He was a great weirdo in Sex, Lies, and Videotape and a admirable good guy in True Colors. (His role was made even better because John Cusack - the usual good guy - was the asshole.) But lately, he’s always the good guy and personally, I was getting sick of it.

 

So then about this same time, I started to see the trailers for 2 Days in the Valley and Spader was on my TV screen and his voice was dripping with disdain. All right!! I love it when my wishes come true.

 

Oh yeah...so I saw 2 Days in the Valley last weekend and it was pretty good. It’s once of those movies where the scenes jump back and forth between different characters that appear unrelated but it all makes sense in the end. (What that piece of shit movie Short Cuts was trying to do, but it just ended up being the most boring flick I’ve ever seen and I’ve yawned through the excruciatingly lethargic Forrest Gump so you know it was bad.) James Spader was an asshole, Danny Aiello was good, Eric Stoltz was Eric Stoltz (who else would he be?), and Teri Hatcher was in it but she didn’t get naked.

 

BAND NAMES

 

I was talking to Joel (don’t call him Lowell) the other night and he said that Likehell (pretty good name) was playing at the Entry this weekend and a band called REO Speeddealer was opening. I think I might go see REO Speeddealer cuz that’s a great name. The best name I’ve seen since last year when Kennedy’s Johnson was playing somewhere.