Acid Reflex

This blog is part nostalgia, part therapy, part distraction, and, hopefully, fun.

I was born in September 1963. My parents took me to the airport in San Antonio to see JFK as he arrived in Texas, not long before that fateful day in November. Many people feel like that is the time America, maybe even the world, lost hope. Things began to change. I guess that’s the dynamic represented in the hit series “Mad Men”.

Being born in ’63 put me at the tail-end of the baby boomers. There is a group of us that don’t really know where we belong. We defy description. Personally speaking, I never fell in the “boomer” category except for a few years in the mid-eighties when I was a young salesman and embodied the yuppie persona when it was in its infancy.

Other than that, my childhood, awash in pop culture of the day, has come back to me. Being overwhelmed by the media in all methods of delivery and content, there has been a level of comfort in revisiting all things 60’s and 70’s. Things were simpler yet at the same time dangerous. The changes in society, post-Eisenhower, became blatant after November 11, 1963 and started manifesting themselves at a feverish clip.

I was a child during earth-shattering assassinations, a costly and devisive war, and criminal presidencies. I was an innocent little kid during free love, peace marches, and satanic mass murders. Yet now, five years from being half a century old, I feel a need to re-examine that time. So much of today’s politics, social mores, entertainment and culture is informed by this brief but powerful time in our history.

Where am I going with all this? I was an only child and without a large family. Television (all three networks and PBS) and comic books were my preoccupation. Mostly, comic books based on television series. As I left high school and started in college, moving on to careers and other avocations, my interests in the media turned to film…of all kinds. My near-maniacal devotion to seeing EVERY film released in the 80’s morphed into to an appreciation of independent films in the mid-90’s and beyond. And now I rent dvd's and vhs tapes of obscure sixties and seventies films. Interesting.

But I’ve lost interest in most current film and television. Thanks to DVD’s, Youtube, and, well, just the internet in general, the content of my youth is begging to be revisited and, yea, obsessed upon. Thus, this blog.

Also, I have found that many young people are appreciating the television and films of those years. Quite often, I find myself pontificating to an eager audience of young film students, video geeks, and cartoon archivists. The minutia that was crammed into my head, then forgotten for over twenty years (and deemed irrelevant and trivial and, yes, regressive) is now total pop culture gold.

In this blog, I will mostly write about my memories in pop culture and somehow relate them to the present media trends of which I know less and less about each day, of which I feel more alienated from the older I get. Sometimes, I may write about history, politics, society (usually in the context of mass media but maybe not). Actually, I don’t know what I will write about. Let’s just see what happens.