The Fabulous Boomer Boys (radio)

Torque, Beemer & Tower

As if the media hasn’t always been saturated by the overstated concerns of the Baby Boom generation, in the early 90s there was a talk show on WHK called The Fabulous Boomer Boys. Three guys, Stuart Fenton, Bruce Bogart and Bob Snyder, friends since childhood, had their own show to address issues which they felt had been overlooked. 

It was called “the first radio show dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation” which was utter nonsense. Since 1946 absolutely everything that exists has been dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation.

However, they were pretty fun guys. Imagine Car Talk except with Cleveland accents and the topic was, well, themselves. Lots of camaraderie, self-effacing humor and laughing at their own jokes.

Just after we opened The Taming of the Shrew, Guerrilla was invited to participate. Bruce Bogart met Beemer while she was working at Dillard’s at Westgate and asked about her Guerrilla pin. He was truly interested in our theater company, even more so when he learned that Boomers were often the focus of our abuse.

Bruce: Well we’re lucky this evening, we’ve got in our studio Torque —

Torque: Hi.

Bruce: — Tower —

Tower: Hello.

Bruce: — and Beemer —

Beemer: Hello.

Bruce: — of the Guerrilla Theater Company. These guys have a theater company — where is it located?

Torque: It’s located downtown, in funky up-and-coming Tremont — it’s right next to The Flats.

Bruce: And it’s a safe neighborhood, right?

Torque: Uh no.

Beemer: It’s getting there.

Bruce: It’s getting there, and one of the reasons it’s getting there is because of the Guerrilla Theater. What they do is, they have this show, and what Torque told me is that they poke fun at our generation with their theatrical productions.

Torque: That’s right.

Bruce: For those of you at home, these people are 24 years old, they’re not exactly Baby Boomers, and they have the audacity to poke fun at our generation.

Tower: Sometimes all you Boomer folks act as though we don’t have any brains at all. You use tactics like the “Just Say No” campaign. Rather than explaining a problem and how it might affect us, you just tell us not to do it. Political correctness is another example.

Torque: You come up with no solutions, just knee-jerk decisions and you want everyone to abide by the decision that you make.

Beemer: You know what you want the end product to be but you don’t want to take the time to reach it so you just think up a catch phrase like “Just Say No” and that’s supposed to take care of it.

Bob: Do you think there are any Baby Boomers like me who “live for today” instead of people like Stuart who like to plan their life?

Torque: Yes, I do, and I respect them, and most of them come to see Guerrilla Theater Company, which brings up another subject which is that we are currently putting up our production of "The Taming of the Shrew" and that runs every Friday and Saturday night sat 8 o’clock and Sundays at 3 o’clock.

Bruce: Okay, you guys come here, you put down my generation, you put down our basic listening audience, I wanna know what you guys would do to make this a better world.

Torque: You mean, as opposed to “making love, not war”?

Bruce: Whatever.

Bob: That slogan I like, forget the “just say no to drugs.”

Bruce: “Make love, not war,” that’s not your generation’s slogan.

Tower: No, our generation says “Make love, not divorce.”

(General groans from the Boomer Boys.)

Bob: That’s a touchy subject for our generation.

Bruce: But I’m not hearing any solutions, I’m hearing slogans from you, too.

Torque: That’s the point, instead of the quick solutions, like divorce, we’re talking about working things out, about working our problems out, not the sound bite kind of answers you get on radio, but going ahead and taking some responsibility.

Bob: Are you married?

Torque: Me? No.

Bob: Then how can you talk like that?

Tower: I’m married.

Stuart: Tower is married, he said before the show he’s been married for six months, and you call yourself a househusband, right?

Tower: Right.

Stuart: Your wife supports you, makes the money, you take care of the house — how long is that going to last?

Tower: How long is that going to last?

Bob: Househusband, isn’t that a Baby Boomer idea anyway?

Tower: Oh you wish.

Bob: Thanks to the Baby Boomers, Tower, someone like you can let their wife go out to work —

Tower: I don’t have to let her do anything, we have this wonderful relationship, it’s not what I give her permission to do.

Bruce: What does she do?

Tower: She’s a systems designer.

Bruce: What’s that in English?

Tower: She makes computer programs.

Bob: Computers, another thing the Boomers created.

Tower: Shyeah, but you don’t understand them.

Stuart: My turn, to talk about sex, with Beemer.

Torque: You want to talk about sex with Beemer?

Stuart: What about sex in your plays, do you talk about the Sexual Revolution?

Beemer: Do you mean gender issues?

Stuart: I mean about how Baby Boomers made sex free, and accessible to all people, and how it’s looked about differently now.

Beemer: You mean “Free Love” and “Expressing Yourself”?

Tower: Done that.

Stuart: Aren’t you glad the Baby Boomers opened that up for you?

Beemer: Yeah, but there’s a difference between free love and having a hundred million different partners and having free love with your own personal sexuality.

Torque: We’ve got diseases now, you gave us Free Love, thanks, now we’ve got all these things to worry about, we’re trying to figure out how to come up with one partner when all of our role models say hey, it’s okay to have as many partners as you want, there’s no need to be anything but promiscuous.

Stuart: Woo!

Bruce: You guys are really down on us!

Tower: We’re getting the big thumbs up from the slackers in the control booth.

Bruce: You people are fascinating to me because I see in you a lot of my thoughts twenty years ago when I looked at my father’s generation. And I wonder what makes you think that twenty years from now someone isn’t gonna laugh at you and say, you people think you have all the answers, you don’t.

Torque: I hope they do laugh at us.

Beemer: I think that’s the difference between our generations — you had the same thoughts that we do now, but we have the drive to carry them on as we grow and do the work, so that our children will be even more motivated to continue that.

Bruce: You think we didn’t have the same determination twenty years ago?

Beemer: Doesn’t show now.

(Hoot and groans.)

Bob: Who got these guests tonight?

- scene - 

Spaceship Earth (film)

Florian Schneider Lives

DID YOU KNOW ..? You can watch first-run art house films, streaming courtesy of your friends at Cleveland Cinemas. (This is not a paid advertisement, support your local businesses.)

Last night we watched Spaceship Earth, a new documentary directed by Matt Wolf, about Biosphere 2, its origins, what went wrong, and what didn’t.

For those too young to remember, or are only aware of the Pauly Shore flick, Biosphere 2 is a minor footnote in 90s history, like the Hale-Bopp comet, or Pauly Shore. It was an enclosed environment in the Arizona desert, and eight individuals sealed themselves inside for two years to see how well they could survive.

My wife and I were trying to remember the details. Didn’t they abort the mission? Didn’t they “cheat” somehow? We remembered them going in (it was in September 1991) but didn’t remember them coming out.

A great deal of the film is dedicated to the foundations of the project which go back to the 1960s. A band of surprisingly capable and intelligent back-to-the-earth people, led by a charismatic if somewhat odd leader, practice avante garde theatre, and teach themselves how to live sustainably, on the earth, and then on the sea. It is a remarkable American story.

By the 1990s, the world had changed and with media attention their greatest experiment, and the personalities of those involved, were picked apart and exposed as less-than-science. This is why people like us, who were only casually paying attention, were left with the impression that it was a failure. Biosphere 2 is a punchline, like Pauly Shore.

But the film’s sincere portrayal of the the founders of the experiment, and what happened to them is what I found most relevant. We have been fighting the same battles since the 1960s; those who are exploring new belief systems and new ways of doing things, against those who just hate those people, and seek dominance, control, profit, and adherence to the dominant paradigm.

This fucking guy.

In this case, ageing hippies built a very sophisticated terrarium, and when their work was complete, Steve Bannon stepped in, kicked everyone to the curb and seold the science to the highest bidder.

Yes, that Steve Bannon. It’s a real what-the-fuck moment. Just watch the movie. What’s amazing to me is that it is impossible to watch, listen to, or read anything today without seeing just how everything that has ever happened has led to this current moment. Baby Boomers have been waging an inter-generational civil war for almost sixty years, the idealistic innovators vs. the aggrieved demagogues, and have destroyed the nation in the process.

“Spaceship Earth” was released May 8, 2020.

Play a Day: Hold Steady

Tira Palmquist

For Saturday I read Hold Steady by Tira Palmquist and available at New Play Exchange.

“How did our parents do it?”

“They didn’t think about it, probably.”

The Big Chill is an iconic film about white privilege, about a cohort of Baby Boomer age people in their mid-thirties, folks who attended university in the late 1960s with all of the historic baggage that brought with it, monied liberals who, at the dawn of the 1980s were troubled by their own success, how they had traded their ideals for a very comfortable lifestyle.

Unfortunately, many Boomer aged audiences took this film as validation for their own having sold out, and found it not ironic at all to purchase the soundtrack, a greatest hits of the Motown era, to make it a number one album and even spawn a second soundtrack of songs by African American R&B artists from the “Big Chill era” (as it was marketed) when there is not one single person of color in the entire movie.

Palmquist’s play, Hold Steady, concerns a Millennial friend group, a modern, diverse collection of sympathetic characters … well, except for Quinn. What is it with people whose names begin with Q?

As our heroes gather for a ten year high school reunion, they share their worries and concerns about relationship and career goals, but as with so many of us it all revolves around money. What you can do, what you can’t do, what you hope to do, what you can reasonably settle to do.

I mean, there is a literal fight over fifty bucks. That scene is amazing.

Many of my friends and colleagues are Millennials, and believe me, they don’t spend their all time eating avocado toast and none of them attended the Fyre Festival. And Palmquist has created a fascinating and vivid weekend gathering, ripe with real world dialogue and situations reminiscent of the people I know.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Nowhere Generation (1991)

From NOTES FROM L.A. 
JUNE 1991 - VOL. 1 NO. 1 - TEMP 72°

Now you can’t afford to take all the drugs your parents used to take
Because of their mistakes you’d better be wide awake.
- Elvis Costello, “The Other Side of Summer”

I’m a member of the Nowhere Generation. I’m a representative of the youth of today, and I’m mad. The world’s in a mess (again, as it always has been, as it always will be) and as a youngster I naturally find it necessary to blame those who came before for all the world’s problems. In fact, no generation in the history of the world has had their rebelliousness so thoroughly documented as the generation that came just before mine.

In the next few months I will be writing about the world, and my place in it, but first I’d like to get a few things straight about the New Generation Gap and what it means to me.

If a generation can be defined in sociological terms in a twenty-two year span, anyone who was born between 1961 and 1983 qualifies. 1961 was a very special year. The introduction of the Pill effectively brought down an enormously self-indulgent birth rate and brought to a screeching halt the production of that generation know affectionately as the “Baby Boomers” and less affectionately as “Those Hypocritices Who Might Have Saved The Planet If They Weren’t Side-Tracked By Their Own Desire For Wealth And Power.”

Harsh words. But this is coming from a member of the Nowhere Generation, a moniker divined, oddly enough, from Esquire yet highly preferable to other titles, most prevalent being the Twentysomethings.

The fact is the top end of My Generation is turning thirty this year, including my brother. He’s no yuppie. He was too young to have been a hippy if he wanted to be, which he didn’t, and his aspirations for power only concern furthering his modest career as a radio producer in Minneapolis. He always used to remind me of Doonesbury’s Mark Slackmeyer, and that’s cool, seeing as Gary Trudeau remains on of the few Boomers who recognized very early on the selling out his peers would be doing. His animated Doonesbury special in 1977 showed his characters, still in college, pondering whether or not any of their heroic civil disobedience during the turbulent late sixties and early seventies would amount to anything, and his 1983 Doonesbury musical chronicled these same characters’ graduation and individual desires to abandon idealism and strive only for personal achievement.

And what’s wrong with personal achievement? you might ask. Nothing. I’m all for it, and if I were any better at it I wouldn’t have time to sit here and bitch. But, as a friend of mine expressed recently, the Boomers came up with several good ways of changing society as we know it, but didn’t have the patience to stick with any of them. So we, the younger generation, who should be impressing our elders with our vibrancy and promise, only depress them and remind them of how short they fell.

As a result, the great media/entertainment machine, which has followed the whims of this most-largest-generation-in-history ever since their conception, churns out television shows stroking the Boomers’ egos on matters such as their success (Thirtysomething), their past (The Wonder Years), and they even tried to glamorize their future with the (thank god) cancelled-almost-immediately My Life and Times, a drama about an octogenarian in 2035, reminiscing over his life. As Tom Carson of the LA Weekly said about this latest effort, “given their track record so far, it may be vanity to assume the baby boomers will have valuable lessons to pass on to later generations.”

But what’s my point, right? Well, for a moment there is no point. But that’s what’s wrong with my generation, or haven’t you been reading Time? We find no point in anything. The great majority of us will settle for modest comfort, and we don’t even expect that.

Everyday I hustle my youthful, 22 year old butt up the Santa Monica Mountains and look out over the staggering metropolis of Los Angeles, and if you know much about L.A., you know I can’t see very far. Rather than taking it all in and feeling a burst of self-aggrandizing energy and proclaiming, I can change the world! I will change the world, me and all my friends! -- instead I curse those who came before me, promise not to drive as much, and hope I outlive the planet.

POST NOTE: Almost twenty-five years ago, a small tribe of Cleveland expatriates lived on a cul-de-sac in Venice, CA. One of my pastimes was editing a newsletter, with plans to mail copies to our friends and family. Before the first issue was completed, I had decided to come back home. Happy New Year 2016.