Word: neon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tower Records looms over the corner of Mass. Ave and Newbury St. in all of its sandstone and blue-steel glory, daring passers by to share in its decadence. Indeed, everything about Tower Records screams excess, from the double revolving doors to the haphazardly placed blue and orange neon lighting. According to Beth Blodgett, a store employee, Tower is "big and cheap and... so Tower...
...brought back chain gangs and black-and-white-striped convict outfits. He's the man who blacked out all television for inmates except G-rated flicks, the Weather Channel, Newt Gingrich videos and (opponents of torture may want to look away here) C-SPAN. He put up a neon vacancy sign at the tent city--get it?--served ostrich meat and green bologna to save tax dollars and made the inmates wear that pink underwear to make it harder for them to smuggle it out and to humiliate them. Sales of pink boxer shorts to civilians are a statewide sensation...
After a few minutes, I soon met my co-contestants, went through make-up and, after many comments on my resemblance to actor Peter Gallagher, walked onto the set. I was immediately assailed by the art-deco-neon-overload-meets-industrial-constructi on set, complete with a live band, stacks of old books as props, local stand-up comic Greg Fitzsimmons as host, two attractive brunette "hostesses" (Heather and Shonda) in tight pastel blue outfits and a giant brain sitting in the center of the set. "`Jeopardy' on acid," I thought...
...many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve--a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo's office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto's teahouses, all exquisite restraint and antique silence. Though both these sides are suddenly in evidence in Olympic Nagano, for most of its life the city and the village venues all around it have offered a down-home, uncrowded, friendly Japan where some...
...thermometer and pouring out the contents, marveling at the slippery weight of the shimmering puddle in your palm? Imagine, then, the excitement of two Arkansas teenagers when they found some 40 lbs. of the stuff--pure mercury--in an abandoned factory where it had been used to make neon lights. They and their friends dipped their hands and arms into it. They poured it on their bedroom floors to see it wobble and flow. They showed it off at school and handed it out in jars and vials. One youth dipped a cigarette in it and smoked it. And then...