Freedy Johnston: Bad Reputation

I first heard this song while it played over the ending credits of Kicking and Screaming (1995), a movie that was both irritating and rewarding. Its characters, MOR collegiate smurfs, back when there were murmurings of a Generation X, got little sympathy from me. No fault on the part of the actors or writer-director Noah Baumbach…it was simply a case of self-loathing for an inherent inability to focus that cost me the kind of education (and social interaction) those characters were getting. This Freedy Johnston video makes me yearn for the Manhattan of the Mind. When I hung out in the hip areas of New York, I’d usually feel alone and wish I were someplace else. Now that I’m in someplace else, well…after fifty years my brain never stops flip-flopping.