Category: Nostalgiaville

It strikes me that, a year ago, I was in the UK at the start of a three week excursion that feels oddly impossible now in ways that I can’t fully explain. To be honest, I think that it felt impossible at the time, but also inevitable, and I was simply too tired to do anything other than head into it and hope for the best.

I do remember, very clearly, being all too aware of how isolating the whole thing felt ahead of time — knowing that, despite the trip being bookended by two conventions and featuring a stay with family in the middle, I would be spending so much of that time alone to a degree that hadn’t been the case for years by that point. It was a scary thought, in many ways, and one that I feel like I didn’t really fully understand until a few days into the trip. (Maybe the first full day after the first convention was when it sank in, when I was staying in an AirBnB in a city I’d never been to before, realizing I had no food and no company and nothing to do for the next 24 hours while I waited for something to happen.)

And yet, there were times when that freedom from expectation or commitment was thrilling; usually when I felt less at sea, such as the hours I spent walking without purpose in the towns I grew up in, just listening to music and rediscovering the streets I’d wandered around hundreds if not thousands of times before. Or the flights and trains and drives into pastures new, and feeling a buzz of excitement instead of loneliness.

(I remember spending an afternoon in Leeds, almost by accident, and it just feeling astonishingly new and right, in ways that I couldn’t even properly put into words.)

There’s a lesson to be found here, as I find myself getting more cautious and older. Something about finding comfort in discomfort, and not letting that anxiety put me off doing things that could be good for me down the line. I know that it’s true from experience more than once, and yet: I still think about the trip from last year, and it feels daunting and impossible, even now.

One of the unexpected by-products of my recent obsessive return to old Flash comics was the discovery that one of the first American comics I’d ever read was amongst their number, and the wave of nostalgia that hit me as soon as I saw the cover.

It’s the cover in particular that had the biggest impact, because while the kid me — apparently the issue came out in 1981, so I would have been six years old, probably? — kept the comic in question, apparently I lost the cover of it along the way. I can remember the interior of it with surprising clarity, especially some pages/images (although, admittedly, the version in my memory has additional scrawls in pen that I added at some point, which was something I did to a number of comics when I was a kid), but the long-lost cover has long been something that became a lot more vague, slipping further and further into a clouded, amorphous state with every passing day… until I accidentally bought it as part of a lot of back issues, and found it in my hands again.

Looking at it now, I can see why kid-me was so excited by the cover: it’s not just that it’s dynamic and has the hero in peril (Look at that posing from Carmine Infantino!), but there are two different bad guys, and each are visually distinct in a way that’s immediately recognizable and understandable. For my sins, I became a massive Rainbow Raider fan as a result of this comic, despite his being clearly impossibly lame; his secret identity is, I shit you not, Roy G. Bivolo; I still can’t tell what side of the thin line that separates genius from disaster that lies on.

Accidentally having this comic in my hands again for the first time in decades felt like a curiously charged moment with significance I couldn’t fully comprehend, not least because it happened so close to my 50th birthday. If there is some artifact of who I turned out to be from childhood, something like this really might be it. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something, although I can’t understand what.

Perhaps it was just telling me that I haven’t really changed that much in all these years. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, all told.

Eating chips — they’re crisps, still, but I’ve been living in the US for more than two decades by this point; it’s the same as calling trousers “pants,” but still cringing a little inside as I do so — while traveling to a convention recently, I found myself having a particularly unexpected and strong sense memory. It’s not that I was immediately transported to another point in my life where I was eating crisps, although that’s not not the case. Instead, I found myself remembering with shocking clarity what it was like to eat lunch in art school.

I don’t mean the food, because if I’m being honest, I really don’t remember the food from the art school. (I think there was a canteen-style meal every day? Maybe? But I genuinely can’t recall.) Instead, I’m talking about the way it felt to sit there in that room, eating whatever we were eating while gossiping with friends and crushes and whoever else happened to be there at the time.

The canteen area — should I call it a “dining room”? That feels so much more grandiose than the reality, which was a medium-size room with really great, massive windows and a couple vending machines at the back that kept us going on more than one late night session — was an escape from the rest of the school in some way, despite being a pretty high traffic area for the school as a whole (obviously). We didn’t have to perform in any official capacity there; there weren’t projects to work on or presentations to give. The only arguments we made we did by choice, and we enjoyed them as a result. It was a haven, and one we retreated to often, especially in the rare occasions that it was mostly empty and you could have relatively private conversations in a building where that felt otherwise impossible.

The large windows were an important part of the appeal, although I didn’t realize at the time; when the weather was good (not that often; it was, after all, the North of Scotland), the entire room felt luminous and magical, in its way: A glowing example of the friendship, community, and small secluded society we’d all found in that building by intention or accident in our time at the school.

All of this rushed back into my head three decades after I’d first arrived at the school — I graduated from my Masters 25 years ago this year! — and all because of crisps. It’s strange, the way our minds work.

Out of nowhere the other day, I remembered the 1980s TV show Street Hawk. For those who were lucky enough not to grow up in such a time when we were so starved for fun and attention that Street Hawk felt like an somehow worthwhile viewing option, I’ll quickly describe the high concept behind the show: a dude had a high tech motorbike, and was a vigilante whose activities somehow always involved the use of his high tech motorbike. Please note: it was a 1980s TV show, so when I say “high tech,” what I really mean is, occasionally it had a computer display of the road ahead with impossibly crude graphics. Nonetheless: that was the show.

As uninspired as Street Hawk undoubtedly sounds — and it really was, don’t worry — it’s worth pointing out that it was part of a strange trend for 1980s action shows where the entire formula amounted to nothing more than “entirely average man is vigilante, but don’t worry because he has a special vehicle of some sort.” The obvious hit of this genre was, of course, Knight Rider — David Hasselhoff and his talking car, a concept so popular and important to so many men’s childhoods that it has been rebooted no less than two times in the past few decades, shockingly — but it wasn’t just Knight Rider and Street Hawk; there was also Airwolf and Blue Thunder, which shared a vehicle if not a sense of self-seriousness. (Airwolf was the more fun of the two helicopter shows, I remember, but I’m not sure how true that really is, and how much I just remember that being the case because I preferred the theme song as a kid.) I’m sure there were other such shows that didn’t make it to Scotland, too; I was probably spared something about one man and his computer-powered submarine, or his technologically advanced scooter, thankfully.

Looking back now, it seems so strange that “one man and his vehicle” was popular enough as an idea to support multiple shows overlapping on the screen and my subconsciousness at the same time. There’s probably something to be said about the ways in which it demonstrated our growing love of gadgets or a dehumanized on-screen hero, not to mention the implied glamour of how much such items must have cost. I didn’t think about any of this at the time these shows were on, of course. Instead, I was 10 years old or so, convinced that I’d never be able to drive a care or ride a motorbike myself, but nonetheless thinking to myself how cool it would be to have a vehicle that could go so fast, and drive itself while I got more focused on saving the small town from some existential threat of the week.

When I think about the various experiments I tried as an art student — I’m speaking about in my work, please understand — one of the things that sticks out to me as a Road Not Taken is the idea of filmmaking. It wasn’t something that I ever really seriously considered, nor investigated past a year or so of half-assedly playing around with a borrowed video camera to create footage that I never got around to editing, because the school wasn’t set up to do such things. (The university my art school was attached to did have an edit bay, but getting access proved to be more trouble than anyone had considered, and something I only managed to successfully achieve once, alas.)

Nonetheless, there was a period where filmmaking seemed like something I wanted to at least attempt more seriously. I was then, as I am now, obsessed with ways of telling stories and sharing narratives, and what little chance I had to be exposed to experimental short films, and “art” movies, made my brain whirr in an excited manner that felt as if everything was possible.

This wasn’t helped — or, rather, was helped, but not in a practical manner — by the fact that I was simultaneously devouring film theory books and collections of essays by filmmakers (I spent a long time reading and re-reading essays by Wim Wenders, whose writing in those essays influenced me far more than his films have) that made the moving picture feel like the ideal vehicle to share ideas and emotions and stories. I felt entirely energized about the potential of the medium in such a way that my limited experience never even vaguely had a chance to live up to. It’s not that I ever decided that these experts and practitioners were wrong about film, as much as I realized that I wasn’t skilled or patient enough to make it work for me.

I think about that often, lately; I’ve been watching more short films again, and thinking about what works for me with them, and whether or not it’s something I could see myself doing with the tech that’s available to me now. I’m probably still too impatient — and certainly too busy — but still; the idea remains as this temping thing in the distance, a chance to complete a thought I first had decades earlier.

It feels oddly important to me that I can actually remember the first time that I saw the Monkees movie Head — not just in the sense of, “if I sit down and really think about it, I can work out where I would have been when it happened,” but as in, I can actually remember the feeling of where I was when I saw it for the first time like a sense memory.

It was the 1990s, and I was in Aberdeen, an art student who was both very much into POP as an idea and an aesthetic — of course I was, I was in my early 20s and it was the era of Britpop, who like me wasn’t into pop at that time? — and into the idea of a counter culture that commented on and hijacked the mainstream for its own ends. I had been reading Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles at the time, and following all the threads that came from that (situationists! Autocritiques! The joy of the spectacle!), and also seeing things that connected from that to other reading I was doing at the time (Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, and other pop-culture writing that focused on punk and rebellion; again, I was in my early 20s), so it proved to be a very surreal experience watching Head for the first time knowing nothing about it other than it starred the Monkees, and finding it to be this weird, wonderful collection of a million things that had been living in my head for awhile, disconnected.

I watched it on television, late at night. I think it was either after a night out or a party at mine — the former, I think, although I did put a video of it on after a party months later, sharing the joy — and I wasn’t prepared. I’d grown up with The Monkees, the TV show, which seemed on re-runs pretty often when I was a kid, strangely enough, and that was reason enough not just to tune in, but to record it at the time. (I did the same thing with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which I seem to remember was shown immediately before or after it; that one, at least, was advertised as a messy counter-culture classic.) I can remember lying on the couch while everyone else was asleep and just being amazed by what I was seeing, thinking, “This is the movie I always wanted to exist and didn’t think could.”

Thirty years later — well, almost, at least 28 — and I still think that about it; it’s a movie that I think of worryingly often, and still with no small amount of hushed awe that it was ever made, or fit so clearly and so easily into what I was thinking at the time. To this day, Head still feels like a magic trick that I can’t work out how it was done.