Word: neon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...doesn't just live in New Jersey. He is New Jersey. He's exhaust-choked freeways lit up by garish neon signs (see "Born to Run"). He's wild nights at the Jersey shore (see "Greetings from Asbury Park"). He's boring towns where there's nothing to do on a Saturday night anymore except write songs about them (see "Born in the U.S.A...
...Bolio's (1310 Mass. Ave) is the best in the Square. There's a lot of truth to their argument. Try the chocolate-and-Health-bar-dipped gourmet cones. On the other hand, if you go more for the simpler flavors, there's Baskin Robbins (1230 Mass. Ave). Neon-lit Haagen Daz (in the Galeria) is fine if you've got money and you're not interested in volume. Brigham's is the Howard Johnson's of the Square, with fewer flavors and cheaper prices. Bailey's (21 Brattle St.) is good for old-fashioned ice cream parlor ambiance...
...every turn, Hav's storybook past collides with the neon present. The annual Roof Race, Europe's oddest sporting event, sends multinational Havians sprinting across the peeling ruins left by Athenian, Czarist and British occupations. Noel Coward and Nijinsky played here in Hav's heyday; Nazis hid out among its elite residents. Present-day Havians are baffling shadows. The last pretender to the Turkish caliphate, a principal shareholder in Hav TV, tries to marry Morris to his vizier. She sips coffee with a Chinese financial pirate and recognizes a bartender at the opulent casino from his days at Harry...
Ironically, the U.S. may have lost its standing as the world's prime outdoor neon user. That honor may now go to Japan, for elaborateness if not footage. Stern, the U.S.'s foremost neon historian and owner of Let There Be Neon, a Manhattan studio that designs for clients such as CBS and Sony, has seen international interest change even America's use of the form. Says he: "Times Square today is there for the Japanese chairman of the board who looks up from his limousine and feels that his product has arrived in the U.S. market...
...Vegas, whose towering, grandiose signs Writer Tom Wolfe once characterized as "Boomerang Modern" and "Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral," neon has not faded. The skyline remains an electric testimony to a raw and rambunctious American spirit. With its arrival elsewhere in so many shops and galleries and trendy facades, neon, which after all is the Greek word for new, seems to have found a means of staying that way. The medium has learned to bend with changing tastes...