1990's=1970's? (A Brief Symposium, Memoir and Descriptive Essay of the year 1996 in brief..ads)
In the mid 1990's, like say around 1995 or 1996 or so, several companies and corporations, but primarily Burger King, launched a series of televised advertisements that incorporated the sampling and use of certain extracts of popular to semi-popular 1970's songs. As a child who, though quite athletic and active and somewhat outdoorsy, watched more than his fair share of television, I, back when I was 12 or 13 or 14 or so, I saw this series of commercials, and was affected by it. Sometimes, and I know this sounds tremendously silly, but sometimes the very hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I felt a dense, crushing yet somehow gentle wave of overpowering awe sweep over me. There was something about this music. Though all of it was 20, 30 years old, it was, most of it, all new, brand new to me, and discovering it (like my rediscovery and very expanded discovery of the music of Elton John that would happen about ten years later, in 2006) was a significant even to me. Also, sometime around this time period or a little before it, the Ford Motor Company started to run an ad campaign that made use of incredible, incendiary yet simple, homespun, effervescent anthemic songs from the 1970's also, like Rare Earth's "I Just Want to Celebrate." Now that was and is a good song, and it will always be so, but it is somewhat strange how that song, along with songs like "Tempted by the Fruit of Another," "I Like it Like That," "Still the One," "Good Morning Starshine," "That's the Way," and others like that, songs which were made in the late 1960's, early 1980's, those songs, whenever I hear them now, I immediately connect them with that time period, 1996, one of the best, most exciting and happiest times of my life. Thus, even now, I am hit with strong memories that are more like vivid, hallucinatory, almost real flashbacks and overpowering waves of intensest awe, when I hear songs like those. I don't know whether to thank or hate and sue Burger King, for this effect that these songs, that didn't belong to them or that time period in the first place, have on me. And, I hope on others....for I hope I am not the only one who ever felt this way. Who felt captured by, swept along with the music, but not just any music, music that in many ways would have been the definitive music of AM aor radio in the 1970's & 1980's...or so I would presume. The interesting thing about memories like these, especially of that time, and you must remember that Burger King and the Ford Motor Company only did this, ran these commercials, for like a year or so, is that I could describe them in such vivid, poignant, piqued detail that this blog would end up being at least ten or twenty pages long, if I described every last thing associated with that music, those commercials, that time and the urban/rural neighborhood in Kittery, Maine that I lived in at that time. Yet blogs from others seem to be shorter, I've noticed and heaven forbid that I break with tradition or risk annoying my readers, friends and subscribers who might happen to read this, so let what stands now suffice-if not exactly forever! ;)
(Note: Sometime earlier I tried to post a blog that was very similar to this one, if much shorter than it, yet, though it was my own first official blog post, it did not work, did not register, did not show up, did not manifest itself for some reason, so ironically, now that it is my newest one, it is actually my oldest one, even if the original copy doesn't seem to exist anywhere. That, to the best of my knowledge was about five weeks ago. Perhaps it was sooner, but I can't remember any of it very well, nor even the full context of the entry, of the post. I suppose it doesn't much matter now, but I thought I should include this note that traces the history of the entry somewhat. Sorry if my slight attempt at authorial oration and pontification has proved to be somewhat of an annoyance. In future, I shall desist all impulses that relate toward the telling of unnecessary things and details. No one needs or wants minutiae....I always seem to forget that perfect, salient, saltant point. Well, it's not that saltant-and if you don't believe me, look it up and see for yourself. I will however, let everyone here in on a little secret, I will confide in you, if you will: I believe my next blog-to be originated on Myspace, but moved, uploaded, relocated and pasted to or on Facebook and elsewhere-will be a little bit of a memorial description of Sparkle Spot in Kittery then and now, when it was a store, a building, a somehow vital force, if only a business, and when it was, as it is now, a gravel pit, a deserted, empty, godforsaken lot. A tiny piece of the Sahara in the middle of Kittery. Nothing, and no one, where once stood something and someone. A locality, an edifice replaced by banality and nothingness. It will be memorial not in that it is a eulogy, but rather in that it will be little an episode, an extract from a memoir of mine. It shall be a history in part of my history with it. Though I never worked there and didn't personally shop there all that often. Perhaps, in a small, sad, inevitable way, an unintentional way, I was part of the reason why it was demolished, why it closed and ceased to exist. Perhaps I helped to make it extinct in someway. Maybe-or maybe not. It's not like I lose much sleep over it one way or another anyway. Well, until next time, then. Until the time that I shall write, post and unveil that little tract about the Sparkle Spot: some kind of piece of sublime heavenliness in a town already scented by the drifting, wafting perfumes of Eden that caressed it and lent all but happiness and glory to the entirety of the town at least in my memories of my childhood, even though it was not all paradise, not all heaven, much of it was barren, lonely and hellish...but there was more good than bad, and who wants to remember the wretchedness and the wickedness of it, in it, anyway?)
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