Downtown Seattle in Gray

Photo Set by Chloe...

(c) 2013 photography by Chloe - all rights reserved

That Little Angry Guy from the Rarities Album

For all you Gen Xers who remember owning the Rarities album (DGC Rarities Vol.1) I snapped this picture for you while I was at Pike Place Market in Seattle....

At The Great Wind-Up toy store at Pike Place Market in Seattle, this is the table where you get to sample the toys...

When I would listen to this album in my room as a teenager, I'm not sure if I knew what a capture of the zeitgeist this was of the music of that era - it was recorded between 1990-1994.


Below is a copy and paste of the songs on the album - thanks, Wikipedia.  The American edition was different from the British one.   The first list of songs were played from my stereo near the end of my high school days....

American edition

1. Teenage Fanclub, "Mad Dog 20/20" – 2:40
2. Nirvana, "Pay to Play" – 3:28
3. Weezer, "Jamie" – 4:19
4. Cell, "Never Too High" – 5:19
5. Hole, "Beautiful Son" – 2:28
6. Beck, "Bogusflow" – 3:11
7. Sonic Youth, "Compilation Blues" – 3:00
8. that dog., "Grunge Couple" – 3:53
9. Counting Crows, "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)" – 3:53
10. The Posies, "Open Every Window" – 3:14
11. Sloan, "Stove/Smother" – 4:44
12. St. Johnny, "Wild Goose Chasing" – 3:01
13. Murray Attaway, "Allegory" – 4:32
14. The Sundays, "Don't Tell Your Mother" – 2:36

British edition

1. Urge Overkill, "Dropout" – 4:27
2. Nirvana, "Pay to Play" – 3:28
3. Weezer, "Jamie" – 4:19
4. Sonic Youth, "Compilation Blues" – 3:00
5. Beck, "Bogusflow" – 3:11
6. that dog., "Grunge Couple" – 3:53
7. Counting Crows, "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)" – 3:53
8. Maria McKee, "Plague" – 3:44
9. The Posies, "Open Every Window" – 3:14
10. Sloan, "Stove/Smother" – 4:44
11. St. Johnny, "Wild Goose Chasing" – 3:01
12. Murray Attaway, "Allegory" – 4:32

Low Tech Gen X

Mattel did a re-issue of their handheld, late-1970s Classic Baseball and Classic Football games in 2001. My friend Cory had the originals of these two games as a kid, and then he got the Mattel remakes more recently when they were re-issued. He let me take some snapshots of the baseball game which is the one I liked the best as a kid. I love the very retro Gen X childhood look of these....  

This represents the very early days of handheld gaming and I love how low tech these are. These games have "alarm clock" LED also known as "seven-segment" LED score boards and are the first generation of handheld digital gaming systems like Nintendo's Gameboy that followed many years later.

If you are Gen X, you watched an analog world phase into a digital one.

Now my friend Cory is a software consultant, and it is amazing not only to think how far technology has come in the life of Generation X, but also how far Gen Xers have come in their knowledge of technology from childhood until now. 

My older step-brother had this toy way back in the day. I wasn't supposed to play with it, which meant I did anyway when he left the room. Soon he soon caught on and kept it hidden it after that....So I only played with this toy a couple of times and then I never saw it again, which is fine, because I was busy with mastering my Maze Craze skills on Atari, and didn't have time to worry about it.

Do you remember having one of these as a kid?  Here's a fun article on the history of these types of games: 

A Brief History of Handheld Video Games

For my friend Cory and every Gen Xer who had one of these growing up.

(c) 2013 photos and writing by Chloe - all rights reserved    

The Pacific Northwest and Generation X

The Pacific Northwest is the region of the U.S. that has been most associated with Generation X, which is part of the reason I feel such a connection to this place. I love Portland for the way that a paper cup of hot coffee warms up my hands as I stand in the soft rain and wait to cross the street.  I love this city for the way the air is full of the scent of Evergreens. 

From this overcast sky and the bridges over the rivers of Portland and Seattle, a way of life infiltrated our consciousness in the 1990s that was the antithesis to the 1980s - living more green and simplifying more.  Kurt Cobain talked about realizing how much happier we can be by going to a thrift store of pre-owned things and stumbling across an unexpected treasure instead of going into a nicer store with a lot of money to buy everything in sight.

Looking out at these streets, I think of all the Seattle Grunge Era bands that played here in these buildings just before they became famous - fighting back against the corporate machine with their guitar riffs.  Those were my teenage years. I also think of all the Gen Xers like me that were twenty-somethings, finally done with college but with daunting student loans, making their way up these streets and up elevators to find temp jobs to hold us over one weekly paycheck at a time. In those days, I used to look out through glass buildings at a view just like this when the sun was going down and the city lights were just starting to sparkle. I'd dream of being a writer. 

When talking about success, Cobain mentioned that he was the happiest before the enormous fame came to him - when they would be playing live at some small venue, or when he was dreaming about how good things would be someday. And this concept keeps coming into my life - that we spend a lot time thinking of the way things maybe will be or could be, but we can be happy now - that what we have now is enough. 

People always ask me how or why I ended up here ten years ago. There's a lot of reasons - the main one is that I knew in my heart that I was supposed to be here. I came here with just a small car full of things and no job or place to live and I started a new life for myself. The Pacific Northwest had always had a draw to me from the first time I visited here as a child looking out at the passing Evergreens on the winding mountain roads. I love the way the lights reflect on the Willamette River as the soft dark blue glow covers the city. I'm so happy I'm here. I'm grateful for what I have learned from this corner of the world - where the land comes to an end and the Pacific Ocean laps up onto the shores. 

Night comes and the shining dots of light show you where the river's edge begins.  

I love Portland. 






(c) 2013 photos and writing by Chloe - all rights reserved

Falling Blossoms on Burnside Street

Bright pink fallen blossoms around my feet while walking around SE Burnside Street in Portland - I snapped some shots to capture this fleeting window of time we are leaving behind - when the blossoms begin to fall to make way for the unfurling of green leaves. This is where you might be finding yourself right now - you've seen too many things around you fall and fall apart.

But you're forgetting about the unfurling - the new beginning that awaits you.  If your plans, or your hopes, or your art has seemed like these blossoms - trampled underfoot on a busy sidewalk - maybe that was just a way to make space in your life for new and better things to come. 

Today is Orthodox Christian Easter - also known as Pascha - the Hebrew word for Passover. Orthodox Christianity waits for the Jewish Passover each year before we celebrate the resurrection.  And I am always so in need of a new beginning by this time of the year - for a resurrection in my faith, and in my hope. Whenever I watch the falling of things - the falling apart of things - I need to remember that this is not an end in itself. This is a way of making room for things to come.



(c) 2013 writing and photos by Chloe - all rights reserved

The More You See of Someone's Heart

Back in the days when I lived in Kansas, there was a certain peace I would feel when looking out over an open prairie. I believe a prairie shows its beauty the most at dusk on a warm day - the tall grass venerating the dry earth, the gold outline of sun on the drifting clouds, the barometric pressure falling heavy and thick.

Sometimes the radiating heat of a paper coffee cup warms my hand on a chilly, overcast Oregon morning, and as I walk down the street, I might think for a moment of the sun arching over the Kansas prairie....

I sometimes think of this one night all those years ago when a group of friends got together - how we walked out on the prairie past the grazing horses just before sunset to a small, empty cabin so that several of us could share our art, music and writing with each other. By the light of a lantern flame, I held a short story I had written and I read it to the glowing faces around me. Others shared their work, and then my friend Alicia showed us a pencil sketch she had made of cream diffusing into a cup of coffee. Some people see beauty in the things that others might not even notice. She knew I really liked the sketch, and much later, when I was going through a hard time, she gave it to me. While I kept it for many years, the many moves of my nomadic life eventually separated this and many other mementos from me. To thank her for that picture, or maybe to bring it back alive in some way, I recently took this photo for her....

Alicia is the inspiration for this blog.

She and I broke bread many times together in my college years. It was through many of our after-church lunchtime conversations that I started to realize how fascinated I was with Generation X. In those conversations we had about life, there was something I discovered - even though she and I had grown up about a thousand miles away from each other, our formative years had a thousand things in common.  It wasn't until many years later that I began to read about the collective experience of Gen X online and in books, but this journey all started for me through face-to-face conversation with a fellow Gen Xer. As those conversations continued, she and I began to realize that there a thousand pop culture references we could both relate to, and there were a thousand tiny details that were similar about our childhoods.  We found that we had played the same games with our friends on our elementary school playgrounds, and even meticulously folded our notes to pass to our friends in middle school the same way. And I realized that if our formative years had been that similar in spite of growing up so far away from each other, there must be a Gen X collective experience after all. Growing up, I had constantly seen (and had even felt overshadowed by) the collective experience of older generations. I had not yet begun to see the collective experience of my own generation until I met her.

Often the people who see beauty in the things that others might not even notice are the ones who carry with them a deep and intrinsic wisdom. Often the people who  don't demand a lot of attention are the ones who have the most to offer. Some people carry a light with them that causes others to be ignited and inspired. I am grateful that all these years later Alicia and I have reconnected. I am fortunate to have met her on my nomadic journey. Even though she has been through much of the suffering that our generation is known for, she remains profoundly kind and full of God's light.  

The more I have seen of your heart, Alicia, the more I have been inspired.  

All my love to you.

_________________________________________________________________________________

(c) 2013 writing/photography by Chloe - all rights reserved - except for Alicia - she can do anything she wants with it! 

70s Rec Room Time Capsule!!

This is a look inside a circa 1970s rec room that has been a very important place in my life....

When I am in this room - this time capsule - the calendar rolls back a few decades. All the sudden I feel compelled to go find every friend (and View-Master reel) I lost track of from my early childhood. All the sudden I can hear Debby Boone and Bee Gees songs echoing in my head. 

The Rec Room: In whatever form it took, Gen Xers remember a room like this from their youth where they played air hockey and/or Atari. The difference is that I didn't set foot for the first time in this room until after 2000.

This room is a serious 70s time-capsule. It is the rec room in a condo complex built in the 1970s that my friends used to live in until recently. In an average home, most things start breaking down after a certain amount of time which is why you find appliances and misc. items in a house from any and every decade. Hardly anyone ever used the room, so to enter it is to step back in time. Because this room sat mostly sat empty over the last four decades, everything original remains. 

There is almost nothing anachronistic about this room - a Hollywood set designer could not have done a better job of creating an era with props. My friends have sold and left their condo and have left this time capsule behind. But the 70s Rec Room Lives On. 

The room includes some very cool graphic pics of San Francisco - these pics remind me of an OP (Ocean Pacific) brand yellow/tan/earth tone tee shirt I had from that same era. In this room, I can feel the roughness of macramé on my hand or the warmth of avocado green afghan blanket on my lap.

A perfect rec room requires a kitchenette (or a wet bar depending on the nature of the event). I can't get enough of the trend-setting mirrors on the wall.

Why did I always find this room so strangely comforting and thought provoking? Maybe because when I was here it felt like we were back in time - like there was still time for more things to go right and less things to go wrong in the youth of Gen X. All these graphics, and textures, and patterns would cause me to think about the fabric of time. In this room, I would get this fleeting, and maybe childish, feeling that I could somehow go back and fix all that fell apart in those years. Doesn't everyone get that feeling sometimes? This is where I would be when I would get that feeling. 

There was more than one night in this room over the last years that we discussed multiverse theory. Imagine a hypothetical situation in which Gen X did not grow up during a Crisis era of history. Imagine all those memories of yellow and orange in the background, but no endless stream of crises along with it. 

Orange chairs cast shadows on the technicolor carpet and I feel a strange desire to drink some Tang.  While  in this room, I've marveled at how EVERYTHING around me was made in the 70s.

Remember when TVs were actual pieces of furniture? There's also a record player tucked away inside this monolith structure. This is the godfather of entertainment centers, with doors that close in front of the TV. This TV's glory days were when new episodes of CHiPs, Alice, and Mary Tyler Moore would air. When several of us friends got together here, this became a good surface for setting up a laptop to occupy the kids with a movie. (Ideally retro-style Gen X claymation when possible). 

The TV is still complete with a rabbit ear antenna. Adjusting these to get a clear picture would now be considered an obsolete skill...looking at this gives me a hankering for a Swanson's fried chicken TV dinner - the kind in an aluminum tray that you heat up in the oven....

And suddenly I get a flashback of sitting on the seats of a Southwest Airlines plane by myself as a six year old to fly from the city where one of my parents lived, to the city and state of the other. In those days, I didn't just hang out with latchkey kids, I hung out with boarding pass kids. 

Since my friends moved out of their condo there will be no more dinners or late night conversations in this room. Goodbye bygone era. Goodbye 70s room. We will miss you.

for KT and CT - thanks for all the 70s memories.

(c) 2013 writing and photos by Chloe - all rights reserved....if you know the artist who did the cool retro West Coast screen-print images above, send me a message or comment so I can give them credit!!