Through a Fourth Freshman's Eyes

For the fourth year in a row, I present my presumptive Mindset List for this year's high school graduating class. Since this year's college freshmen were mostly born in late 1995 and early 1996, it astounds me to think I'm closer to turning 40 than I am from earning my own high school diploma. With that said, 1996 was kind of a slow news year, so a lot of the tidbits I mentioned last year still apply.

So why do I keep writing this list every year? Because when Beloit College releases their annual list in August, they're always bound to miss something.

Without further ado, if you are an incoming college freshman...

...there have always been DVDs.
...O.J. Simpson has always been *cough* "innocent" of two murders.
...The Unabomber has always been under federal custody.
...Dean Martin, George Burns, Terry Southern, Yitzhak Rabin, Audrey Meadows, McLean Stevenson, Erma Bombeck, P.L. Travers, Jon Pertwee, Timothy Leary, Mel Allen, Ella Fitzgerald, and Claudette Colbert have always been dead.
..."ValuJet" has always been associated with plane crashes, safety problems, and all-around incompetence.
...Prince Charles and Princess Diana were never married.
...you briefly shared this planet with the first known 120-year-old person.
...Croatia has never had a civil war.
...Texas has always been threatening to secede from the United States.
...world champion chessmasters have always been playing against computers.
...you've never eaten an Arch Deluxe.
...the Dow Jones Industrial Average has never been below 5,000.
...you've never been to a Ramones concert.
...you've always associated Will Smith with movies, not TV, and only intermittently as a musician.
...there have always been at least three cable news networks, and they have always been differentiated by being conservative, liberal, and moderate.
...the first James Bond was Pierce Brosnan.
...the New York Yankees rarely miss the playoffs.
...there has always been NHL hockey in Arizona.
...there has always been an NFL team in Baltimore-- at least one that wears black and purple, anyway.
...the Dallas Cowboys have never won, much less played in, the Super Bowl.
...the United States has never hosted the Summer Olympics.
...Gregg Popovich has always been head coach of the San Antonio Spurs.
...Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Derek Fisher, and Ray Allen have always played in the NBA.
...it has always been possible for an NHL team to win a Stanley Cup in its first year of existence.
...Northwestern University has always been known as a "football school."

Next Week: my 9th Annual Fantasy Emmy Ballot.

(445)

Sonic Blast

Earlier tonight was Game 4 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, pitting the star-studded, narcissistic Miami Heat against the gritty, well-rounded Chicago Bulls. This is the Bulls' first conference final appearance since 1998, when Michael Jordan willed the oldest team in the NBA to a sixth and final title. Admittedly, if you're a sports fan and came of age in Chicago in the 1990s, chances are you were spoiled by the Bulls' dynasty. Admittedly, I almost completely missed out.

You see, by the time the Bulls were on the road to their third three-peat, I had actually grown tired of their constant winning. The 1995-96 season, in which the Bulls set the single-season record for wins, was both an exciting and tedious experience. On one hand, the level of talent on their roster was incomparable, and they'd run laps against the most of their opponents. However, nearly every win was a blowout, and half the time there was no point in watching beyond the second quarter.

Between Jordan's first retirement and comeback, I had grown a soft spot for the Seattle Supersonics. The roster they had at the time --Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, Sam Perkins, Detlef Schrempf, and so forth-- was a tad topheavy but had all the qualities of a contender. I owned a Sonics cap with the classic green and yellow skyline logo and a T-shirt with the slightly less memorable red-and-green icon they wore in the second half of the '90s.

With my noted fanship of the Sonics, imagine the conflict of interest that arose when the Bulls faced Seattle in the 1996 NBA Finals. On the day after the Western Conference Finals ended, I wore my Kemp jersey to school with all the pride and hubris an 11-year-old could muster. At lunchtime, a girl in my fifth-grade class* sat across from me, and without ever taking her eyes off my jersey she started talking smack about "my" Sonics. I was a fairly sensitive kid, and I already had a reputation for outbursts that irked most of my peers, but that didn't really hinder them from teasing or making passive-aggressive comments.

So naturally, I had to defend my honor the only way I knew how: by screaming at the girl to knock it off, than go on a crying jag. One of the volunteer "lunch moms" had to walk me out of the gymnasium/assembly hall/cafeteria so I could cool off. Alas, the damage had been done: word of the incident spread throughout the school, and as the Bulls manhandled the Sonics en route to their fourth title, my last two weeks of fifth grade bordered on excrusiating. The teasing was almost constant.

As the 1996-97 school year began, the tension between me and my classmates was down to a simmer, but now I was known for being "anti-Bulls." I still wasn't rooting for them, but I never hated them per se, yet my shame kept me from discussing hoops at length. There were brief perks of derision when Chicago faced the Utah Jazz in the '97 and '98 Finals, but nothing at the level of what happened when the Bulls faced Seattle. Even though John Stockton had been one of my favorite players for the longest time, I made sure to keep my mouth shut.

Even after Jordan retired for the second time and Bulls GM Jerry Krause gutted the roster for salary cap space, the resentment lingered. The stigma of anti-fanship didn't really die out until 2000 or so, when Krause finally traded away Toni Kukoc and Dickey Simpkins, the last remnants of those championship teams. I shifted my focus to baseball and hockey, and whatever taunting I went through during the '96 Finals was either forgotten or dismissed as juvenilia. I went from a small, close-knit grammar school where I finished 6th grade with 29 other kids, to a high school where I graduated with 499 of my peers, and maybe a handful were semi-aware of my odd fanship. When the Sonics closed up shop and moved nearly 1,600 miles in 2008, I barely batted an eyelash.

So do I support the Bulls now? Yes, though not with the same passion I display for the Royals or Blackhawks. Watching this potential new dynasty blossom has been both a relief after years of losing, but also an opportunity to look back at my awkward childhood and the mistakes I might've made. In the wake of "The Decision," LeBron James and company have become the supposed villains of the NBA, which only makes this Bulls team all the easier to root for. As such, I'm also disappointed that Miami has now taken a near-insurmountable 3 games to 1 lead. If Miami wins Game 5, I'll shift my fairweather support to whoever wins the west, whether that'd be the Dallas Mavericks or the OKC Thunder... formerly known, of course as the Seattle Supersonics.

Next Week: the year in music, 1998.

*This girl came from a family of athletes, so she knew her stuff. She was later the captain of the varsity volleyball team in high school, and her older brother was a low-level draft pick by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2001.

That Wonderful Year in Music... 1996

As many rock historians will argue, 1996 was grunge's final stand; the genre was fully immersed in the alternative movement and the punk revival, but that revitalizing Seattle aesthetic had run its course. In retrospect, the rock sound was haunted by the ghosts of alt-nation past (Kurt Cobain), present (Bradley Nowell), and future (Layne Staley), and we the fans were Ebenezer Scrooge. 1996 was also a commercially successful year for female singer-songwriters with alternative inclinations; the popularity of Tori Amos, Alanis Morrissette, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple and others --while not necessarily enduring-- was enough to launch the Lilith Fair music and arts festival, i.e. "the women's Woodstock," a year later.

From a personal perspective, 1996 was the year I turned 12 years old, and it was probably the first year I demonstrated any interest in politics. I spent a big chunk of the year parroting my dad's political beliefs (social moderate, fiscal conservative, pro-Flat Tax), demonizing President Clinton with the luddite bluster of a radio pundit, and alienating some of my sixth-grade cla.ssmates in the process. The Democratic National Convention was in Chicago that year, and I avoided news coverage of the proceedings like the plague. A decade and a half later, my underinformed and transparent dabbles with conservatism feel like juvenilia, a phase of my life that I don't look back upon fondly. On a more positive and less polarizing note, 1996 was the year I attended my first Kansas City Royals game (at New Comiskey), my first Blackhawks game (versus Anaheim), and moved into the attic bedroom that I spent the majority of my teenage years.

BEST ALBUMS:

1. Pinkerton, Weezer. Rivers Cuomo set the blueprint for the band's 1994 debut: sunny, heavy guitar-pop with proto-emo and punk flourishes. Their sophomore effort was also heavily manuevered by Cuomo, eschewing playful power chords for raging, squealing guitars. Initially lambasted for taking such a starting left turn --Pinkerton made many critics' worst albums lists that year-- this album now stands as a singular artistic achievement bolstered by Cuomo's growth as an anxious, witty songwriter. Time heals all wounds, it seems.

2. Odelay!, Beck. In 1993, wispy anti-folk singer Beck Hansen released "Loser," a surrealistic blues-meets-rap lark that spoke to millions of jaded Gen-Xers. Three years later Beck, with crucial assistance from uber-producers The Dust Brothers, cut Odelay!, an album that fleshed out his unique voice, eclectic sound, and constant stylistic shifts. The album scored three Top 40 hits, but Odelay! is best enjoyed as one singular recording, a sonic mosaic whose overall image is greater than the sum of its parts.

3. The Score, The Fugees. An oasis from the increasingly monotonous and repetitive Gangsta Rap sub-genre, Lauryn Hill, Pras, and Wyclef Jean gave hip-hop a badly needed transfusion of intelligensia and social consciousness with their masterpiece The Score. It's hard to find a track that tops the clever "Fu-Gee-La," but the two standouts here are both covers: a funky rendition of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With Her Song" that turned Hill into an MC to be reckoned with, and an interpretation of Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" that makes you wonder why it wasn't a rap song to begin with.

4. Being There, Wilco

5. If You're Feeling Sinister, Belle and Sebastian

6. Evil Empire, Rage Against The Machine

7. Tidal, Fiona Apple

8. Sublime, Sublime

9. Everything Must Go, Manic Street Preachers

10. No Code, Pearl Jam. An underappreciated entry in the PJ canon, their fourth album might pale to their first three efforts yet rocks hard all the same. What might alienate you upon first listen is Eddie Vedder's sudden interest in Eastern religion and philosophy; each track delineates or alludes to some type of moral dilemma. Acoustic tracks like "In My Tree" and "Off He Goes" provide free range for Vedder's soul-searching, diamonds in the rough of a flawed yet utterly fascinating recording.

Honorable Mentions: Tigermilk, Belle and Sebastian; Maniacal Laughter, Bouncing Souls; Fashion Nugget, Cake; Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z; Murder Ballads, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Tortoise.

BEST SINGLES:

"Santa Monica," Everclear

"Here in Your Bedroom," Goldfinger

"Swallowed," Bush

"Popular," Nada Surf

"Sucked Out," Superdrag

"Pretty Noose," Soundgarden

"Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart," Stone Temple Pilots

"Too Much," The Dave Matthews Band

"Pepper," Butthole Surfers

"Setting Sun," The Chemical Brothers

BEST VIDEOS:

1. "1979," The Smashing Pumpkins. One day in the life of a group of disaffected teenagers wandering nomadically in a late-70s model Dodge Charger. Billy Corgan once said this was his favorite Pumpkins video, though quite a few fans would argue for...

2. "Tonight Tonight," The Smashing Pumpkins. ...this, a faithful homage to the early 20th century silent film A Trip to the Moon starring Tom Kenny and Jill Talley of "Mr. Show" fame.

3. "Drop," The Pharcyde. After big years in 1994 and 1995, video director par excellence Spike Jonze had a relatively quiet '96. During his breather, however he still managed to create one great forwards-going-backwards clip featuring one of the '90s most memorable one-hit wonders and a litany of special guests.

4. "The Distance," Cake. A corporate drone runs away from his life and responsibilities --literally-- and encounters Fellini-esque oddballs in a colorful visualization of one of the year's best left-field hits.

5. "Big Me," Foo Fighters. Hey, remember those old Mentos "Freshmakers" commercials?

Honorable Mentions: "Sunday Morning," No Doubt; "Heaven Beside You," Alice in Chains.

Your thoughts?