big hair

The face of nostalgia is…Simon Le Bon

Duran Duran is one of those bands that I always made fun of but secretly liked. Sure, they were very pretty and had ultimate 80s hair, but their music was catchy and the videos were fun, even if they eventually turned into bloated spectacles (hello, Wild Boys).

Today I spent $7.99 to pick up the one album of theirs that I owned again, so I now have a digital copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Listening to it, I finally realize those pops I thought were a bad copy of the cassette version I bought in the olden days of 1983 are actually in the recordings themselves, preserved with remarkable clarity in Apple’s shiny AAC format. I don’t find it annoying, though. It’s actually kind of quaint.

The album doesn’t sound as dated as I had expected, which is probably just another sign of getting old. I promise the next music I buy will be from this century.

Hair (not the musical)

As I mentioned in the previous post, as a teenager I became concerned that my ears were big. Too big. So big, in fact, that they must be hidden from the world, lest their bigness lead to certain catastrophe. This is evidence of my ear paranoia.

The photo below is undated but I believe I was 14 at the time, which would place it around 1978 or ’79. Note the glasses aren’t even close to being on straight but who cares? I had tinted aviators and was stylin’ big time. But really, your eye is drawn to the Hair, which appears to be reluctantly avoiding swallowing up my entire head. That is serious girlie hair. I mean, it’s almost pretty and really, it shouldn’t be. There’s also an admirable synergy between the crooked glasses and that immense mess of golden locks in the way the hair grows down to the top of the glasses and then seemingly along them in order that I may still have an unobstructed view of things.

I sometimes harbor a fantasy of growing my hair long again. Pictures like this tend to cure that.

(click to enlarge — if you dare!)

Yes, I can play keyboards

Actually, I can’t, but I kind of look like I’m auditioning for a synth-heavy band in this photo from my 1990 college student card. This is probably the last photo I have where I am clean-shaven. Compared to the high school grad photo from 8 years earlier, it’s about 1000% better.

1990 college student card