This Year's Model

 

And back-peddle back to the fall of '95. On college campuses around America as of the 90s, attempts were always made to hot-house things, in different formations and contexts. Throw the artist kids together, or the finance kids, or the science kids, and see what happens. PSU in State College was in at the deep-end with North Halls: a three-dormitory assemblage put together for artists, creative types, misfits, and queer kids to live in. I lived in North Halls for several years. As was later the case at 4325 in West Philadelphia, rock hipsterism was rampant. As of late August '95, through October and November, the hottest platter doing the rounds in North Halls was this, Elvis Costello's early jitterbug-n-squealing keys classic This Year's Model. North Halls had a so-so relationship to rationales. Sometimes, group dynamics happened for a reason, sometimes they did not. This time, as is explicated in Equations (#39), the appearance of a siren perfect for the place & time parameters was a call to arms. Everybody fell in love at the same time with Amanda, or Mandee, who I called Hope in Equations for her extremely extraordinary resemblance to rock chanteuse Hope Sandoval. She also looked like Justine Frischmann. Amanda was a heartbreaker and a Don Juana, who ripped to shreds, in punk-Gothic fashion, everyone she could get her hands on the right way. Yet, I would be lying not to concede that she did so in a memorable fashion, and that we all had fun in her game-matrix, even as we got mangled. For instance, I learned from her the rigors of Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast. When she pressed the Zorak-ian button on her wrist to incinerate me, at regular intervals and with the same ostensible sense that I was being uncool about whatever, it fed into all of us being who Declan McManus is on this platter: long-suffering victims. Even though the Equations piece explicates why watching from a distance could be more fun than getting up close and personal. That kind of fun for me was right around the corner in '96.