90's Baby: 1992
Hey Midwits. Happy Friday. It’s been a little while since I’ve written one of these, but in any event, I’m going to try and finish writing about the 1990’s before the year is up. Welcome to my new subscribers.
When writing an installment of 90’s Baby, my methodology has been to take inventory of all the things that I know I did or saw or experienced that particular year. Oftentimes, this will take the form of a list. Concerts I know I went to, or movies I know I saw, or albums I bought, or episodes of TV that I watched. Here’s sample from the list that I compiled for this post:
Calvin and Hobbes
Batman the animated series
Aladdin
Mighty Ducks
Newsies
Lessons of Darkness
Fire Walk With Me
In 1992, it was about a year or so since my family had moved from San Jose to the Detroit suburbs. For 11 out of the 12 months that year, I was seven years old. My memories mostly revolve around watching TV, listening to the radio, reading books, interacting with the kids at my school, and going to parties with my parents.
My second grade teacher was a lady named Mrs. Meyers. I don’t remember much about her except that she was a large, loud woman with a curly, bob type of hairstyle, and on one occasion she told the classroom a story about her son’s diabetes, which made him wet the bed. I can’t remember the point she was trying to make, but I think it was that we have to unite, as a society, to overcome the scourge of diabetes. I also remember working in a group with three or four other boys in my class. The output of our groupwork session was a sort of sketch or presentation which I’ll call “The first Black President,” which one of the other boys copied almost word for word from Eddie Murphy.
Talking about it amongst ourselves, we all thought it was really funny. But when we reenacted the performance for the class, no one laughed. And at the end, Mrs. Meyers closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if trying to suppress an angry outburst, or maybe imagine she were somewhere else.
Along with the edgy and obscene comedy1 which was so popular at the time, the boys in my grade were all into extremely violent “R” rated movies, and sports. Terminator 2 had just come out the previous year, and when I’d go to the toy store with my mom all the action figures were from movies which I’d never seen - Robocop, Alien, Escape from New York, etc. I think maybe I was allowed to watch Batman Returns, but maybe not even that one. I lived vicariously through second hand accounts of grisly stabbings by the T-1000 or Michael Meyers or Sharon Stone’s character in Basic Instinct, or Clint Eastwood’s racist vigilantism in Dirty Harry. I have no idea how a second grader was legally admitted to a screening of Basic Instinct in the theater. On the weekends, I’d spend my Saturday afternoons flipping through the Cabela’s catalog which came through the mail, and looking at the guns.
Musically, I was mostly listening to Rap and R&B - on the newly launched 96.3 Jamz - which I would soon be disabused of by my peers, as I already described in this previous post, and also here. But for now, it seemed like Black music and movies and culture were everywhere around me. The sound I associate most with this time is the West Coast synth-whistle, which they were even beginning to incorporate into children’s music, if that’s what Kriss Kross is.
It’s interesting to me now, because although I was living just a few miles from the largest majority-Black city in the country, there were absolutely no Black people at my school, and this would remain the case until I went to college. My mother, who is from Bangladesh, was almost certainly the most melanated person in my world at the time, and on the occasions when she’d come to visit me at school I felt extremely self conscious.
Every other week or so my parents would take us to a party hosted by my mom’s friends in the local Bangladeshi community. The kids there ranged from my own age to high school, and probably one or two who were visiting from wherever they went to college. I remember that their style seemed very different from what I saw young people wearing at my school and the town where I lived. I don’t mean the girls who came dressed up in Saris or whatever, but that their style was generally a lot preppier, and there were also one or two kids dressed in baggy flannel and khakis like I saw in music videos. It feels like a very stupid2 observation now, but it seemed to me that they felt more of a shared cultural affinity with the other non-white people we were seeing in the media sphere and pop culture. But if I felt conspicuously non-white at school, I also felt a little too white in their company, and as soon as I was old enough to stay home by myself, I stopped going.
The year was also significant because of the Rodney King verdict and the rioting it set off across the country. In Detroit, Malice Green was beaten to death by two white police officers, whose nicknames were “Starsky and Hutch.” As I grew older, I got used to hearing adults in the suburb where I lived complain about the mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young, and blaming all the city’s problems on him. He hasn’t been mayor for like, 30 years or something, but I’m pretty sure they’re still at it.
The Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me, was released in theaters, and was a massive flop with critics, as well as long time fans of the show. Here is the review from the New York Times, where the reviewer basically says that Lynch gave up trying to make the story make any sense. The film has been rehabilitated to a great degree, but I think its an idea that has persisted to some extent.
I watched Fire Walk With Me for the first time just under a year ago. The plot focuses on Sheryl Lee’s character, Laura Palmer, who is largely absent from the series, although her death is the foundation of the story. Like so many things in the town of Twin Peaks, Laura’s life seems idyllic. But beneath the surface, in her home and in her bedroom, she is tormented by a malevolent spirit which has preyed on her since she was a child. And although she doesn’t understand the true nature of what is happening to her, she finds herself suddenly transformed from a child to an adult. “Your Laura disappeared,” she says. “It’s just me now.”
It sends her life into a tailspin, and at night, prom queen Laura is cast into a shadow world inhabited by evil criminals.
After I watched Fire Walk With Me, and looked back on the arc of my own life, I was overcome by the sense that something must have happened to me when I was very young. I still don’t know what it was exactly, but I know what happened next.
See also: Martin, In Living Color, etc.
I was incredibly stupid at this age. It was at one of these same gatherings where I told another kid that Michael Jordan must really love McDonald’s, because he takes time out of his busy schedule to go on TV and tell us what his favorite menu items are. The other kid said that he was doing it because McDonald’s paid him money, which I remember thinking was very cynical.