Category: Nostalgiaville

It feels like a very specific way to identify my age — one of those tell me you’re in your 50s without telling me you’re in your 50s memes that randomly appear in your social media feeds if you don’t prune them enough — to admit that I can remember when Star Wars wasn’t just uncool, but something that was basically forgotten about my pop culture as a whole.

That feels like a near-impossibility for the last… what… 27 years? Something like that? Ever since the prequel trilogy started, it feels as if there’s been a sincere attempt on behalf of multiple companies to make sure that we not only remember that Star Wars exists, but that we think of it as a living, breathing piece of mythology as opposed to, you know, a franchise that is allowed to fall out of favor every now and then. It’s been pretty continuously on movie screens or television screens or whatever you stream to in all of that time, never mind all the books and comics and video games and toys and whatnot that comes along with all of that.

It’s weird to think about that, in a way. I mean, in a sense, it’s really not, because that’s the seeming ambition of every franchise along the way and has been since… well, pretty much Star Wars first came out in 1977. But when I stop to think about the sheer barrage of Star Wars in the past three decades, it strikes me that it pretty much matches the volume of merch and everything that surrounded that original trilogy when the movies were, you know, actually phenomenons. Now, they’re just there, seemingly omnipresent and everything that accompanies them just exists because that’s what we expect now, I guess.

It really does sound almost impossible, in that context, to recall a time when Star Wars was this weird shared secret nerds shared: references that not everyone would get, but when they did, it was a sign that they got it, they were like you in some magical, dumb way. I’m talking… the late ’80s, very early ’90s, I guess? When the generation who were 5 or so when the movies were coming out had grown up somewhat and would see old merch in charity shops and get excited by how much it reminded us of more innocent, more imaginative times. I miss that more simple nostalgia, I admit.

Anyway, happy Mandalorian and Grogu release, I guess.

I read something recently that made an argument that, for all intents and purposes, my generation was the first proper Gamer Generation, and it once again made me doubt my nerd credentials; while I have surprisingly fond memories of borrowing a friend’s Sega Mega Drive* so I could play the original Sonic the Hedgehog, I couldn’t really make any claim that I was a gamer at that point, or any point afterwards. I don’t have whatever that particular gene is, no matter how hard I try. (And I have, occasionally, tried.)

The thing is, I used to, before then. In the mid-1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my Amstrad CPC 464, the awkward home computer that had a tape deck attached for ease of loading in any number of ill-produced games such as Oh Mummy (Pac-Man, by any other name, except the ghosts were Egyptian Mummies) or Biggles, based on the deservedly-forgotten time-travel movie flop of 1986. At that very specific juncture of my life, I was a gamer, and an avid one, at that; spending hours playing the lo-fi games on my particularly lo-fi computer and buying the magazines that offered reviews and cheats and whatever passed for news at the time of what was to come. (Amstrad Action and Amtix, you were oddly important to me at some point.)

In what was a strange glimpse of a world that lay in wait for me, I remember that the last Amstrad game I got truly obsessed with was 1986’s Batman, a video game produced by Ocean Software that I can remember with unusual specificity. Or, rather, I remember the cover artwork and print ads for it, and the feeling when it came out that it was a weirdly retro piece of pop culture to be basing a game around: Batman, in 1986, was already getting a very serious, very cultured makeover in comic books like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, but that hadn’t reached me just yet. Instead, Batman was re-runs of the 1960s TV show and half-remembered comics from my (even younger) youth, and this game: an oddity based on something I thought no-one really cared that much about.

But I loved the game, as frustrating and non-sensical as it was; I spent hours playing it and failing to get anywhere close to the end despite all the cheat sheets, and I didn’t care. I was so excited by how odd it seemed, how much it felt like it was something that was mine in its design and hyperfocus and the 8-bit remake of the TV show theme and that cover artwork, which I stared at for far too long. It wasn’t a particularly good game — in writing this, I discovered that someone remade it for the internet, so I’m about to find out just how not-good is really was all over again — but it was my game, and the closest I ever got to being a gamer, per se.

It was all downhill from there.

When I was doing my Masters degree, I came up with the seemingly-smart-at-the-time idea of writing and illustrating a book that would display my talents and influences in one place at one time. It did both things, although looking back now, I feel self-conscious about how heavily influenced much of it was by the usual suspects, and how simultaneously obvious and oblique much of the writing was; that said, the quality of the book — and, indeed, the book itself — isn’t really why I brought the whole thing up right now. Instead, I’ve been struck by remembering how it came together.

The end of my Masters degree was this strange time; my entire post-graduate program was a compressed one, a solid year with only a couple weeks off for Christmas that included both a post-grad and MA degree course squished into 12 months, meaning that if I passed the post-grad, I’d find out in May, and then have just three months to complete the MA portion of it; in order to assist doing so, the few of us in the course (maybe 12 of us in total? Maybe less? It was a handful, at best) were given the entire otherwise empty art school for the summer as studio space and told to get it done. The clock was ticking.

What this meant was, of course, we just worked. Our lives became airtight work modules, losing a summer to just getting it done, whatever “it” looked like to each of us. (All of our work was very different, very distinct from each other.) The countdown to the deadline was something we were all far too aware of, having to plan and execute our final-final show almost immediately after our post-grad degree, which was itself just a year after our graduate degree, and it was appropriately suffocating and high-stress the entire time.

In deciding to make a book — and a hardcover book at that — I accidentally set my own deadline earlier: after all, I had to have all the material finished and ready to be bound by a third party earlier than the actual deadline, in order to let the book binder do their work by the actual deadline. I seem to remember my end-of-work deadline was three weeks earlier than everyone else’s, which isn’t a small amount when the entire thing lasted three months. For me, it all came down to staying up overnight the day before I had to get everything to the book binder, printing the book out page by page on a laser printer in a friend’s house.

I’d made my life harder through my ambition: I was making five editions of the same book, but each one was, I seem to remember, around 100 pages and using different paper and card stock throughout, with the dimensions of the book unusual for reasons I don’t even recall anymore. The night wasn’t just printing, it was collating, cutting all the pages down to size, sorting out paper jams and swapping in new toner cartridges as necessary. In all, the whole thing took about 12 hours of activity; I finished just as the sun was starting to come up.

What I remember most about that night was the way in which it felt like the entire post-grad/MA program in miniature: starting with ambition and goodwill that got increasingly frazzled and worn as exhaustion set-in, regretting said ambition by the end of the whole thing and wishing I’d gone for something easier. A manic excitement surrounding the entire enterprise that felt more fragile the more it continued, and a sense as everything became worn through that maybe it would never end, somehow.

That I find myself feeling nostalgic for that night, decades later, feels ironic given how much I was not enjoying it at the time — even a little masochistic. But there was a magic to that time of my life, even if I didn’t realize it at that moment; perspective that I should probably remember for every moment, moving forward. Everything can look amazing, in retrospect.

Another comic book nostalgia story. The other week, inspired by the nostalgia (and, beyond that, simple enjoyment) of reading the big Superman omnibii, I considered buying a massive collection of another series I loved from the same era, only to take a look at the actual comic book collection and realize that I could simply complete a collection of the original comics for a fraction of the price; I did that instead, of course. What I didn’t expect when the various eBay-ed packages arrived, however, was the surreal sense memories that I’d have as I opened them.

It’s one comic in particular that set me off. I can remember buying the first issue of the 1987 Justice League (later Justice League International, later again Justice League America because there was a spin-off so the world got divided; capitalism taking its toll again back in 1989 as it did) off the stands; I was 12 at the time, by process of math, and I could tell you right now what newsagents I was at and walk right there if I was back in my hometown. I can remember, inexplicably, what it looked like in the store, and my giddy sense of excitement at picking it up and taking it home. (It was a first issue, it said so right there on the cover, that made it a big deal, right? It was the start of something, it felt important even if it’s just because it told me it was important!)

More than that, I can remember loving that comic; I re-read it over and over and over, fascinated by its off-kilter tone and references I didn’t quite get at that age and the artwork that was more photo-realistic and less dynamic than I was used to. I became obsessed with that series to the point of almost spending obscene (for me at the time) amounts of money on a rare edition to complete the set. I read that issue until it was literally falling apart; I can remember the tape that held the cover on, and how oddly guilty I felt about that at the time.

All of this flashed into my head as I unpacked this new edition of the comic. I kept looking at it in awe, as if it held some kind of magical powers, almost too nervous to even touch it; this connection to something so important to me almost four decades earlier, as if it could open a hole in time and drop me back there and then without effort.

Part of my personal mythology is the fact that it took me two attempts to get into art school when I was a teenager; I spent a year between high school and art school at community college, working in a class to make sure that the embarrassment and shame I felt not going on to art school as had been my dream for years by that point didn’t happen again. But here’s the thing; the reason I didn’t get into art school that first time wasn’t just because I wasn’t talented enough — and, in fact, I might have been talented enough all along. The reason I didn’t get into art school was also because I completely screwed up the deadline for application.

I could not, for the life of me, remember what made me check the details for art school application on the day that I did, but I do remember the utter shock and numbness that came upon realizing that the application — complete with a portfolio of finished work, and a series of submitted paperwork that I had not even started to that point — was due that very day. I remember the sense of dissociation where I told myself surely this isn’t actually what’s happening, oh no, I’ve screwed up absolutely everything by not paying enough attention and begged for the help of absolutely everyone around me to try to pull something, anything, together to submit.

What this meant in practice was that I had to fill in my part of the paperwork, get the remainder to various teachers in my high school to add their parts, and also pull together what little work I had accomplished in the past few months to make something resembling a coherent portfolio of work that would then be packaged together and taken to Glasgow — an hour or so away from where I lived — and then dropped off at the art school there, my first choice even though I knew I had almost no chance of actually getting in. In a perfect world, this would’ve taken a week or so of careful consideration on everyone’s parts, but instead we came together to hurriedly pull it out of thin air in three or four hours from first panic to leaving the portfolio in careful, if disinterested, hands in Glasgow.

I remember at the time being utterly apologetic to everyone and in disbelief that I both hadn’t known about the deadline in advance (I mean, I clearly had known about it at some point, but then forgot) and that I’d somehow, coincidentally, checked just in time to meet the deadline. I remember thinking to myself at the time, I will never be this forgetful or thoughtless about this kind of thing again, this was so stressful and horrible. That last part wasn’t true, although I’d get there eventually. When I think about how much I double- and triple-check deadlines and how anxious I get around this kind of thing now, I’m sure this is the root. It just took decades to come into its own, is all.

I suddenly remembered, the other day, something from 30 years ago. I was in my final year of my Bachelors degree at art school, and nearing the end of the course, and the world was electric. My final year of that degree was a big one for me in all kinds of ways — aside from the stress of will I get my degree or have I screwed up and wasted the last four years of my life?, there were also the facts that I spent much of the year in my first proper extended relationship (which went south before too long for reasons that were as much “I didn’t know what I was doing” than anything else; I was a bad boyfriend), I was slowly beginning to realize that maybe I wanted to be a writer instead of a graphic designer or visual artist, and I was dealing with the fact that, because it was the last year of my degree, I’d soon be saying goodbye to people I’d grown close to over the past four years and didn’t quite know how to deal with any of that.

In the middle of all of this, the music scene of the time was in flux in ways that felt exciting and explosive — part of it was that Britpop was dying although we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, and the death throes were offering up some of the more interesting music of the movement, but there was also the truth that I was looking outside of my relatively narrow parameters of the previous few years and finding things I’d ignored or never discovered at all years prior. Added up, it felt like the perfect soundtrack to a life that felt perpetually in motion at the time.

The thing I remembered was checking my bank balance in the town center, and seeing that I had, essentially no money. I literally had just over ten pounds and I knew no money would be coming in for at least a couple of weeks, and I needed groceries and, you know, money to just get by. Instead of doing any of those things, I withdrew ten pounds and went to buy an album for myself — Supergrass‘s In It For The Money, perhaps ironically given the title — entirely secure that I was making the right decision and everything else would fall into place and be fine.

Here’s the thing: I was right. Things did fall into place, and everything was fine. And the opening three songs off that album were exactly what I needed to hear at that point in my life, and I made the right decision, at the time and even looking back now. But when I remembered all of this, the thought came to me not that I was dumb and should’ve bought food or whatever, but that I miss that utter sense of security and belief in the universe that everything would work out. Remember when you could make bargains with life like that and they’d pay off?

To this day, I can remember my first December 26th in the United States. It wasn’t just the day after spending Christmas Day at home for the first time since moving, it was also the first time I fully realized what it meant that Americans don’t do Boxing Day… a realization I came to by the fact that I found myself on a bus to work at 7am that morning, appalled and incensed at the injustice that Americans were somehow expected to just go straight back to work the day after Christmas.

As someone who’d spent more than a quarter century in the UK to that point, I understood that Christmas isn’t a one-day thing. Even for those who don’t buy into the idea — like I do — that Christmas is really all about the build up to December 25th and the season as a whole as opposed to the presents and the food and all of that, there’s a general understanding that Christmas is at least a three day event: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. You need a day after the one with the family and the presents and the food to recover; it’s entrely necessary, and suddenly, it didn’t exist anymore.

That day at work, I was sullen and sulky, there under unspoken protest. I remember so clearly that I wanted to silently go on strike because it felt inherently unfair that I was there in the first place, as if something had been taken from me by simply having to work, and feeling all too conscious of the fact that I could have taken the day off if only I’d thought to plan ahead. I was mad in the kind of scattershot, indiscriminate manner that means that I was actually mad at myself but unable to accept that, but looking back, a lot of me still thinks, sure, but in the defense of past me, why the fuck are offices open on the day after Christmas?

I’ve learned my lesson since then, and if you’re reading this when it goes live, I’m very purposefully not working. I hope your Christmas was/is a good one, if you celebrate, and if you don’t, I hope everyone has at least left you alone enough with the holiday cheer that you don’t resent it the way I resented working those many years ago.

I realized, with the slow, dull awareness that such things come to me, that I have a particular type of sense memories that only occur with stairwells — and, specifically, walking down stairwells. I couldn’t tell you why this is, what there is about the feeling of walking down a set of stairs that locks everything about the experience away in my memory when everything else from that time period becomes faded and filled with holes; I couldn’t even tell you why it’s walking down the stairs as opposed to up that seems to be the key, but it is; perhaps walking up, I find myself too aware of other things and walking down I’m concentrating on less? Who can tell how the brain works.

And yet, I can tell you exactly how it feels to walk down the backstairs into the shared basement of my first apartment in the US; how thin and claustrophobic the stairwell was, how rotted the wooden stairs were to look at, yet how solid and sturdy they felt by comparison. I can tell you how oddly comfortable the experience was, even though it meant walking past multiple other apartments’ back doors on the way down — we lived on the top floor of the building — each one potentially about to open at any minute without warning. I could talk about the shift in light of the stairwell as I reached the parts of the building blocked from natural light by everything else all around.

Or I could share the feeling of walking down the stairwell in my high school, and how nervous I was when I first started attending the school at the top of the stairs, my teenage vertigo warning me to stay away from the railing in case I somehow fell over. Each step at first being nervous about how steep they felt, hating the enormous windows the stairwell opened out onto. (I had similar nerves walking the stairwell down from the top floor in art school, years later; there was something about the design of the central stairwell in the school that felt as if all it would take would be one trip and I’d somehow cartwheel over the railing and collapse to the floor three stories down, broken bones and blood. Schools and stairwells, apparently not a good combination for me.)

Or the stairs in the house I grew up in. Or the stairs in the hotel in Paris when I was 21 on a magical weekend trip that was tragic and heartbreaking as you can only feel when you’re 21. Or the stairs in my first house in Portland, or the stairs, or the stairs, or the stairs.

It’s nice, given how unreliable the rest of my memory is, to have something so clear in there for multiple markers and areas of my life. I’ll never understand why it’s walking down stairs, but I’ll always be grateful that they’re there.

I remembered, the other day, about getting an unexpected letter from America when I was in my early 20s — 20, maybe, or perhaps 21? — and how it felt at once entirely surreal and unexpected and perfectly in tune with everything else that was happening in my life at the time.

I was finishing up my second year at art school, which had been frustrating but good for me in any number of ways I wouldn’t realize until years later; I’d become more self-sufficient after living on my own in the middle of nowhere for six months or so, and I’d started to find out who I was in terms of being a social animal as well, which is a thrilling moment for anyone of that age. Certain benchmarks were still months and years away from happening, but I finished up the year feeling like a very different person than I was when I’d started, and that was an exciting realization to have. The world felt filled with possibility.

In the midst of all of this, I’d been writing to my favorite comics of the era, because that’s what was done back in those pre-internet times. To my amazement, some of those letters had been printed and people had written to me in return, which was even more amazing. (My full address was published with each letter, because I didn’t know enough to ask them not to include it.) It felt like a connection to a world and an industry than I’d loved for years by that point, and one that had previously seemed to be separated by a magical veil that only allowed me to receive information. Now, somehow, I was sending and receiving. Again, everything felt newly possible.

One day, in the last few weeks of the school year, I got an oversized envelope that had DC Comics branding. I opened it to get a note explaining, basically, hey we saw the letters you wrote to some of those comics and we thought you might like this comic, too, give it a try and if you do like it, spread the word to your friends. There was also a black and white photocopy of an upcoming issue of Xombi, one of Milestone Media’s comics of the time.

To their credit, I did like it: it was weird and lyrical and read like the spiritual successor to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol of a handful of years earlier, but drawn by an outsider artist who was mad at the page. I started buying it, and would have spread the words had I any friends who’d be into that kind of thing. (I didn’t.)

What stuck with me more than the comic itself, though, was the idea of someone who published the comic seeing something I’d written and thinking I was worth the photocopying and postage to get this preview. I felt accidentally, undeservedly important and entirely humbled and terrified by the concept. But it fit with the everything is possible somehow feeling of the year I’d just had, and the blurring of lines between me as an audience and a participant in whatever I was reading. The boundaries became that little bit fuzzier.

Looking back, I wonder if I’d have ended up where I am now professionally (or even personally) without that letter signalling that someone, somewhere, had been paying attention and some domino in the back of my head falling over at the thought of, if it happened once, why couldn’t it happen again…?