In the fall of 1996, Tom Hanks, hot off Forrest Gumpand Apollo 13, cemented his role as America’s rose-colored glasses with That Thing You Do!, a directorial debut that looked at the music of the 1960s through the sanitized filter of a fictional pop band called The Wonders. Like the group’s titular hit single, That Thing You Do! floats in a strange, alternate version of the decade completely unmoored from the actual culture that defined it. It’s a world where seemingly no one’s worried about trying to compete with The Beatles, even though everyone’s trying very hard to sound like them.
That Thing You Do! takes place in 1964, but it just as easily could have been about the year it was released—a year similarly crowded with fun, forgettable music that may as well have been made by fictional characters, so fleeting was its impact. It’s a year when the biggest song in the world was Los Del Rio’s “Macarena,” proclaimed this century by VH1 to be the “greatest one-hit wonder of all time,” which dominated Billboard charts, FM radio, and the teachers’ portion of school talent shows for 14 straight, interminable weeks. In everywhere but America, its reign was challenged only by the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe,” a hit that heralded reclamation of the proudly commercial, pre-packaged pop that the rise of “alternative rock” had so briefly seemed to snuff out.
But 1996 was also the year that this so-called “alternative” music began to produce plenty of its own versions of The Wonders, playing equally disposable songs that sounded like facsimiles bleeding in from some alternate universe. The faux-graffitied writing had been on the wall for alternative rock’s attenuation into corporate-engineered dross since approximately two weeks after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, right around the time Live’s Throwing Copper was released. But as much fun as it would be to lasso the corpse to Ed Kowalczyk’s dumb ponytail braid, the truth is it was making its guttural death rattle for many months before Live’s album of melodramatic, faux-introspective anthems for the arena of one’s own ass. And 1996 was the year it finally growled its last.
When experiencing a work of art, a curious exchange takes place; the work projects its aura, and we project our own emotions and precepts on the work. Enigmatically, we encounter ourselves in the work.
Sadly, falconry does not typically involve donning a raptor-suit. But we guess it sounds pretty cool anyway …
“A typical hunt for me is driving out to a field, getting to a good spot and then removing Isabeau’s leash and letting her go,” Kate says. “I walk through the woods rattling trees and brush and trying to get game to move while she follows along with me. When something does move, she explodes into action and goes for the kill.”
Aside from the obvious intense hatred of small mammals, why would anyone do this? Kate says, “falconry allows me to step into [the bird’s] world for a time and be an active part of the natural order in a way that very few people ever get to experience.”
Plus she has genuine affection for her avian killing machine, and this is just how it eats: “Sometimes I’ll lose sight of Isabeau, but then she’ll get my attention and get back to the squirrel she’d killed, staring up at me like she was saying, ‘Hey! Look what I did! Now hurry up and open it. I’m hungry.’ I love that reckless, snarky, wild bird.”
Falconers just love falcons, and the fact that they’re terrifying murder birds is just part of the package.
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