Saturday, July 2, 2011

Lindsay Lohan, Franz Ferdinand, and Other Historical Figures

•Lindsay Lohan turns twenty-five today.  It amazes me that she’s that young.  I feel as if I’ve been hearing about her substance abuse, car crashes, and legal troubles for at least a decade.

A check of my files, though, suggests that the first I ever heard of her was when she swept the Teen Choice Awards in 2004 – and suddenly everyone was talking about some “Lydia Lohan” person, as I put it in an e-mail exchange with Daniel Radosh.  Soon afterwards, she would be taking the title of the project Herbie: Fully Loaded to heart, and it’s been a downhill ride from there.

(Would that making crazy chicks sane were as easy as the process used in this excellent Bob Newhart sketch, of which Dan Greenberg reminded me.  And it would be that easy, if the crazy chicks weren’t crazy.)

•You know what’s even older than Lohan’s Teen Choice Awards sweep, though?  “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand – late 2003, somehow.  (Back in those distant days, their fellow Scot, Grant Morrison, was writing X-Men comics, but nowadays, he’s over at DC Comics preparing to write the history-remaking Action Comics #1 starring Superman, so you may as well enjoy hearing him enthuse about it in his Scottish accent.)

•Older still is the Busby Berkeley- and sci-fi-influenced 1995 art film Ferrum 5000, which I finally looked up on YouTube after sixteen freaking years of having it on my handwritten list of movies to maybe sorta get around to someday watching.  Looks a bit dated now, though the retro feel makes it hard to gauge. 

•And even older, yet to my mind far more current-feeling: Sebadoh’s “Rebound” and Orangutang’s “Shiny Like Gold,” both from 1994.  I worked with the Orangutang bass player’s girlfriend back then, you know.  Little did I realize they had inadvertently named their band after a species that once tried to rape Julia Roberts (it’s true – they do that).  You see things differently as you get older, even orangutans.  

No comments: