In 1968 a job promotion at IBM afforded my father the opportunity to buy a house in the suburbs of San Jose, California. In spite of the real estate agent’s enthusiasm, we passed on a neighborhood decorated with brightly colored concrete lollipops, at least five-feet tall, dug into the tract house’s front lawns. All the streets had candy names—Candy Cane Court, Candy Cane Way, Lollipop Street, etc. Sweetness and innocence was highlighted by a big lollipop erected by every mailbox.
This was too much treacle and kiddy park theme for us. Nevertheless, we did move into a nearby neighborhood that had the same uniform tract housing and all the soulless, antiseptic qualities that home-buyers at the time found so reassuring.
The cozy, insulated suburb seemed at first to provide great hope to us all. I rode my bicycle to nearby construction sites where new neighborhoods, under the impetus of a great economic boom, sprouted like mushrooms, and in the churned ditches I found precious minerals, giant hunks of black shiny obsidian, which I stuffed greedily into my pockets and into blue velvet Seagram’s whiskey pouches. These whiskey pouches were plentiful.
It seemed as if all the adults in my neighborhood were connoisseurs of scotch and other spirits and they somehow knew that children prized these velvet sacks which could be used to store marbles, toy soldiers, and in my case volcanic glass-like rocks that were once used to make arrowheads by native Americans. It was as if these shimmering black rocks had erupted from the bowels of the earth to confirm my belief in America’s abundant treasure, which extended, I was repeatedly told, to all American citizens.
This belief was confirmed at my new school, Anderson Elementary, where we gathered at an assembly to be comforted by the promise that all kids could now enjoy having pearly white teeth because of “breakthroughs” in dental hygiene—little red tablets that exposed hard-to-find teeth stains, peanut butter and jelly-flavored tooth polish, and unbreakable dental floss.
In addition to our abundance and technological advancements, our country, a majestic, invincible, blessed place, evinced every year at our neighborhood’s Fourth of July block party, enjoyed a state of grace with the Almighty, whose divine hand, we seemed to believe, prevented us from doing any wrong whatsoever.
This conviction was so strong inside of me that I actually believed that the presidential formations of Mt. Rushmore were not the result of arduous man-made carvings but God’s gift to Americans. Surely, it was not man, but God, who had used the wind and the rain to shape that mighty mountain into the images of our country’s beloved patriarchs. No one had ever told me this myth. It was simply something that I had absorbed from my newfound optimism of being an American, and the almost pathological belief in the mythology of my country’s innocence.
This dream of innocence, the promise of forgetfulness, and the dream of eternal childhood drew millions of Americans to the suburbs. We did everything in our power to protect that dream. We hid behind a fortress of carbon copy track homes. We listened to the sterilizing, anesthetizing music of The Carpenters, which blared from our neighbors’ station wagons, overflowing with a bounty of groceries, as they pulled up into the driveways. We got together in the summers to make peach and apricot preserves to affirm the abundance and purity of our backyard harvests.
But there was a flipside to this pursuit of innocence. It seems the more bland our tract-house Eden became, the more demand there was for the sordid and forbidden, anything that would enliven the suburban fare. Eros, free love, brazen sexuality, these were the things that many adults, languishing in their pabulum suburban landscape, craved, so that the stage was set for our entering into a new dawn, the Age of Aquarius, an era of enlightened sexuality that gave us license to explore a more daring side of ourselves.
This translated into a huge number of the adults engaging in gluttonous barbecues, drunken and salacious Halloween and New Year’s parties, and, if you had neighbors with big swimming pools and a stockpile of wine, beer, vodka, and other spirits—like our neighbors the Petersons—then you had the opportunity to participate in a tantalizing baptismal rite—the skinny-dipping bash. In a neighborhood where Fourth of July parties and peach preserve get-togethers weren’t satisfying your craving for a deeper, more meaningful sense of community, you could inebriate yourself, get naked with your neighbors, and make a toast to togetherness, the kind that your more square neighbors could never even imagine.
The Bible for this new age of sexual enlightenment was
Playboy, which our fathers had cavalierly strewn about our living rooms. The Playboy “lifestyle” became a model for the kind of man I would grow up to be. Each issue had a section titled something like, What Kind of Man Reads Playboy? Below the caption was a photograph of a thick-haired playboy hipster, some smirking mustached man in a plaid wide-lapelled sport coat, burgundy slacks, and an ascot. He might be smoking a pipe or holding a martini glass or both. His smarmy grin was one of rakish insouciance and the supreme giddiness of knowing that he could snag any girl he pleased. In the background you’d see his red convertible sport car and behind that a coastal line, above which was a cerulean sky. Below the photograph was a description of the consummate Playboy reader. He was an expert at sating his lusts and a successful businessman, usually his own boss, who broke the rules, not for mere rebellion’s sake, but for breaking out of the stale, conventional patterns of thought that defined his mediocre competitors and kept them far below him, both in business and sexual affairs.
This entrepreneurial satyr was more hip artistically than most and had a huge jazz collection. He was a discriminating, savvy consumer who kept abreast of the latest technological breakthroughs, with a particular emphasis on automobiles, stereo equipment, and home accessories, like revolving doors that, at the snap of a finger, could materialize round zebra-striped beds, electric fireplaces, snazzy hi-fi systems, and wet bars.
Married or not, the kind of man who read Playboy was sexually adventurous since he was not bound to conventional definitions of morality, including the bogus notion of “sin,” especially as it pertained to carnal pursuits. To the contrary, it was the repression of one’s glandular urges that would eventually make man a depressed and crippled reprobate unable to participate in the new Age of Aquarius, free love, and exquisite passion.
Strange how the Lollipop suburbs and the Age of Aquarius seemed to co-exist, reinforcing the other in an intractable symbiosis.
Perhaps growing up the way I did explains why I'm fond of many David Lynch films--notably
Blue Velvet and
Mulholland Dr.--which deal with the absurd schism between innocence and debauchery.
If you don't need a tiny portable radio, don't get one. You'll sacrifice too much in AM reception. Size does matter. For a run-down of the Sangean line, we can thank Mike Walsh for this information:
Here are the lengths of the internal ferrite antennas for three related models, thanks to CCrane's site for the Sonido/PR-D7 and the Universal Radio site for the PR-D5 :
Sangean PR-D7 : 4"
Sonido Radio : 6.25"
Sangean PR-D5 : 8" (200 mm)
Mediumwave performance on the three models is pretty much commensurate with those numbers.
If you don't suffer from signal overload in your location, the PR-D5 should be fine. Otherwise, you might want to consult my GUIDELINES for optimizing AM reception and radio recommendations.