2004-01-09 - 9:29 p.m.
"Dad was a farmer, got drunk, tried to harvest my head..." -Cabbage Head
I miss the Kids in the Hall. I miss that feeling it gave me. I used to love the intro, and those little black and white transition scenes, it made me feel like somewhere out there there was a club full of crazy artists, transvestites, and tatooed women with cigarette holders, and that some day I could find this club and be accepted there. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and I had to be sneaky and stay up until two to watch it with the volume way low. If my mom had ever caught me watching a show where boys kissed boys, I shudder to think what would have happened.
I found a similar feeling years later when I discovered John Waters. They were out there somewhere, a close knit community of social outcasts, making movies and laughing and cavorting about the countryside, having epic and promiscuous adventures. I still try to tell myself it's real, like a grown man trying to hold onto belief in santa claus. They have to be out there, somewhere, in some incarnation.
So yeah, I miss the Kids. I don't know if any show or movie or work of art can make me feel quite that way again. I wasn't even that they were funny. There was something more there that touched me. Maybe it was the dark, edgy (for the time) feel, or just the sense of genuine camaraderie and love between the players, maybe it was Bruce McCulloch's poetic, beatnikish monologues and his intense, aggressive delivery, maybe it was the general gayness of it all. Or some combination of all that.
I could never sympathise with people who get all nostalgic about saturday night live. I just couldn't dig a show that hammered a joke into your head with a ten-ton mallet, over and over again for ten minutes at a stretch. My heart will always be with the kids, they had some real vulnerability and integrity in their humor, and I respect them for it. Go ahead, call me an elitist.
Song of the day: "Having an Average Weekend" -Shadowy men on a Shadowy Planet
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