Summer Hair = Forever Young
Posted on August 23, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Monday starts the school year here, so this is the last Saturday of the summer, and here’s a video from The Academy Is… that looks like the last house party on the last Saturday of summer – i.e., trying to jam in as much “fun” as humanly possible to make up for the fact the next nine months will be spent in class:
Also, I suspect strongly that this video looks markedly different at 39 than it does at, say, seventeen. As well it should. That Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused was fun to watch, but you wouldn’t want to be him.
Ok, just to let you know, the video that shows up on the LJ feed is of Keith Olbermann doing the World’s Worst people for Countdown. Markedly different than this video…
That’s funny.
Weird to see TAI here. My love for pop-punky emo music and my love for blogs by SF writers are just two parts of my life I never thought I’d see intersect.
I liked their music better when it was more emo…
I watched for a short time – soooo glad I am no longer 17 (or even 39 for that matter).
Dazed and Confused, I love that movie!
I’m 40 years old. Last year I let my mother borrow that movie and told her that it is the closest thing to my life during the highschool years that she’ll ever see in a film.
Despite her being a radical hippie in the 60s and 70s and the person who turned me on to reading science fiction…she said it was the dumbest movie she’d ever seen. Oh well.
LJ occasionally has a strange problem where the videos on your friends page will get stuck, so if on one load Keith Olbermann is the first video, on the next load that will still be the first video even if it’s a different post. Bringing up the post on its own page should show the correct page.
I think it’s a browser problem of some sort.
It might be a browser problem.
For what it’s worth, it now shows the correct video on the LJ page.
Oh, boy, “Dazed and Confused.” I have a special connection to that movie — I was the same age as the main character of that movie in the year the movie is set. In other words, I was, like the main character of that movie, 14 years old (or however old he is) in 1975 (or whatever year the movie is set in).
Yes, that makes me 47 now. I’m as old as the Cryptkeeper. But it’s even weirder to think that *he’s* also 47 now.
Well, he would be if he wasn’t fictional.
His name is Mitch, too.
And my high school certainly was like that, but I’m afraid the character in that movie that I probably most resembled was the one played by Adam Goldberg. I took things way too seriously.
I saw the movie again recently — yes, the Matthew McConaughey character looks different when you’re a middle-aged man watching the movie than it does if you’re a teen-ager. The character looks creepy and a little scary. I can envision *him* seven years in his future: Doughy, fat, desperately trying to comb over his mostly bald scalp. Still hitting on the high school girls, when they don’t see him coming.
Likewise, I saw “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” recently, and felt a certain sympathy with Ed Rooney, a middle-aged lower-middle-class civil servant getting punked by a couple of rich, spoiled kids.
Doesn’t make me enjoy either movie less, by the way, or make me incapable of seeing the more innocent interpretation in addition to the more cynical one.
Is this song actually informed by the Alphaville song “Forever Young”, or am I just hearing things? ‘Cause it sure sounds to me like those words are getting the same notes and inflection in both. (And the use of the Alphaville song or covers of the same as a prom staple adds a layer of meaning on the “hearing at seventeen” side of things.)
Jenny@1:
That’s a glitch in how browsers cache (the most recent LJ entry to contain a YouTube vid was pointing to the Olberman vid). Hold down the shift key and click on reload. Or restart your browser.
Either way, you’ll see the correct video.