Category: Nostalgiaville

One of the first things I noticed about the differences between the UK and US after moving to the latter — after things like, the sun seems like it’s a different color over here and American cash is really weird to the touch — was the lack of a monoculture, at least when it came to pop music. I came from a country where everyone knew what songs were in the top 10 even if they didn’t like them; where Radio 1 really was a national institution, for better or worse. There was something comforting in that, to me. It was a north star of sorts for me, if one that I didn’t recognize at the time.

I think about that a lot now, in an era where monoculture seems simultaneously impossible — pop culture has fragmented into a million pieces as a specific form of tribalism feels as if it’s taken over in every facet of… well, everything, really — and entirely omnipresent, with Marvel movies and Netflix and whichever pop figure of the moment (are we past the Sabrina Carpenter of it all yet?). Yet, it somehow feels very different from the one I grew up with: there’s no Top of the Pops and no communal in-jokes that everyone just seems to share even without it being properly and officially shared anywhere. No wonder we all liked Twitter before everything fell apart. (I guess that all came from the newspapers and radio, back in the day…?)

All of this has been coming up as I read The Nation’s Favorite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, an oral history of the radio station’s mid-90s/Britpop era that came out more or less as it was happening. (I’m re-reading it, technically; I first read it when it came out in 1998, but that’s so long ago, I’m not sure it counts anymore.) There’s something about the certainty of everyone involved that what they were doing with a pop radio station mattered that feels almost quaint, in retrospect, but I remember what it felt like at the time, and how surreally “important” Radio 1 felt during that odd era. It was a great time to be in your late teens/early 20s, speaking from experience, because pop culture felt new and thrilling even as it regurgitated and remixed the past in such a way that felt as if it moved through every part of the country.

Maybe that is what skews everything in my perspective; that I was young at the last time when it felt as if pop culture, politics, and social movements were all mixed up and playing into each other, and felt as if that was the way it should always be. (Or, perhaps, I’m just old and biased.)

One of the things I realized when revisiting San Francisco for the first time in more than a decade — and only for the second time since I lived here, I think — was how much the city hasn’t changed compared to the period from 2002 through 2008 when I called it home; I came back with my headspace very much informed by what happened when I went back to Scotland after more than a decade, and found it so different from what I remembered (and expected) that it left me uncomfortable and adrift. The same was surely true of SF, I was convinced, steeling myself for that off mix of disappointment and confusion that I’d felt in my home country. But it… wasn’t…?

That’s not entirely true; there are certainly parts of the city that aren’t the same, and many of the places that formed core landmarks and memories of my city as I lived in it way back when just aren’t there anymore. (Park Chow, how I miss you…!) But I was consistently surprised by how many are, how entire neighborhoods have so many of the same stores and places to eat, how so much of the architecture hasn’t changed in all this time. I went back to the first neighborhood I lived in when I moved to the city (to the country), and it felt as if almost no time had passed; it wasn’t just that my old apartment building was unchanged, but the restaurants and stores around the corner were the same, and the laundromat where I’d spend Sunday afternoons was still open. I walked up and down Clement Street, the mix of Asian markets and restaurants I killed so much time in seemingly strangely intact, with places like Green Apple, Hamburger Haven, and The Bitter End all still there too. How did this happen? I thought to myself. Shouldn’t most of these places have disappeared by now?

I took the same buses (and MUNI trains!) around the city as I did when I lived here, unconsciously knowing exactly where to catch them and what numbers of buses to go for; when I rode on them, the announcements of the next stops sounded like poetry I’d learned years ago that was resurfacing in my head, and the view out the window looked entirely familiar. I went downtown and wandered the streets around where I used to work, and that looked the same, as well, more or less. (Downtown SF, I realized, felt like downtown Seattle to me now that I have more familiarity with the latter city; that feels like an insult, in a way, but one that’s not undeserved.)

It felt good, going back. Better than I’d expected, and a trip that made my head buzz with thoughts and possibilities and nostalgia in a way that felt welcome and filled with potential, instead of melancholy like my Scotland revisit. It felt like something necessary, in some inexplicable, welcome way.

I had this realization, the other day, of my age. I joke about being old, some random old man, past it and the wrong generation to get insert whatever reference here, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t actually feel old, most of the time; in my head, I still feel like I did back when I was in my 30s, as if I emerged into some sense of personality and existence at some point, some definition of maturity and just… stayed there. The birthdays mount up, the body slows down and aches more, but for the most part, I still feel like I’m thirty-something, not 50 years old.

And then I was talking to the kid about the Transformers; he’d made some reference to Autobots and I was trying to explain to him about Transformers and how much I’d loved them as a kid — and also, amusingly, what their whole deal was, because he didn’t actually know; he was aware of the bits that had turned into online memes and gags, but the actual context, what they were beyond robots that screamed dumb things and maybe turned into other things, was beyond him. As I was doing this, and he was responding in a way that was both amused and just confused, I realized: all this shit came from 40 years ago. When I was the kid’s age, 40 years ago was the Second World War.

Later that day, I was listening to Billy Bragg — because, again, I am an old man etc. — and his song “Mid-Century Modern” came on; it’s a song about, in part, realizing that you’re not the young firebrand anymore, and that subsequent generations have moved on and evolved past your progressive politics. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, about the need to keep challenging your preconceptions and beliefs because culture shifts and you should shift with it.

The surprise for me was in the name of the song, and specifically the term “mid-century.” I’m mid-century now, literally: a century is 100 years, and here I am at 50. The things I grew up with, the music I still listen to, were three or four decades old — that’s the distance between my youth and the 1950s and ’60s, which seemed like ancient history at the time. The older you get, the more time flattens, and expands; the more you realize what your perspective looked like years ago, and how wrong you were.

Something I remember from returning back to Scotland two years ago now — and somehow, it’s already two years ago, which is wild to me; suddenly, it makes more sense that I managed to go more than a decade without traveling back in the first place — was the feeling of places I remembered just simply not existing anymore. In some cases, that could be taken literally, because entire streets and neighborhoods had been reshaped and remade in the time I’d been gone so that they simply did not exist at all anymore; in others, it was because I remembered a previous tenant at a particular location, or a storefront that had closed years earlier, if not decades.

It’s a strange by-product of creating so many psychogeographical maps of locations in my past. When I think about Glasgow, I specifically think about a Glasgow of a quarter-century ago or more, the time I was in the city most often and had regular haunts. The Glasgow in my head, the one that is filled with personal flagstones and places that are filled with such specific significance for me that I could never hope to fully explain if I had years to try, is a ghost now, with so much lost to makeovers and reconstruction and simply the passage of time. There’s an entire history of the city that’s just gone now, I discovered with no small amount of sadness.

This hit me the hardest, I think, when walking around the area where all my old comic shops had been; none were there anymore, and that was the strangest feeling given how many hours I’d spent in each of them across the years. One of the shops still existed in a new location, and another had a new comic shop replacing an old favorite in its old location. (The new one was basically a toy shop that sold a handful of comics; my heart sank, but that’s what the kids want now.) It’s embarrassing if I think about how each of those old shops fed into the me I am now, but somehow even more so given that they’re all entirely gone if you visit the city today. An entire history of me that only I know, with no sign left to the rest of the world.

I remember, as odd as this is, a point where I was noticing the names of the writers and artists of my favorite comics, but hadn’t quite gotten my head around it all just yet. Paying attention to names started, I think when I really got into the X-Men — a point when I was… maybe 10 or 11 years old, and had decided with the confidence and certainly that you feel at that age that I was collecting comics now, this was a thing I did — and it seemed like a sign of my newfound focus on comics as a thing that I was into. Yet, years later, all of these people whose names I recognized month in, month out (or week in, week out when it came to the British comics) seemed… unearthly. Unreal, somehow. They weren’t real, they were unattainable. They were as fictional to me as Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne themselves.

At some point, in what was apparently early 1988 from looking back at publication dates — I would’ve been 13 at the time — DC house ads started appearing, advertising the upcoming launch of Animal Man, written by Grant Morrison. I knew who Grant Morrison was, having enjoyed his Zenith in the pages of 2000 AD for awhile, but the concept of the same man managing to write both British and American comics broke my brain entirely. That, I decided in my unformed brain, was surely impossible. Far more likely, I deducted, was that there were two entirely separate men both called Grant Morrison who both wrote comics. What an unlikely coincidence, I told myself!

I can’t remember how long I held this impossibly dumb idea in my head; certainly, by the time Animal Man was actually coming out, I’d realized the error of my ways. (There was probably something in an early issue emphasizing that it was, in fact, the same man.) The dscovery that someone from Britain — from Scotland, not that far from where I lived, even! — could write for American comics was something that, in its own way, changed the way I saw the world. Somehow, everything seemed a little bigger, a little more possible. If you could come from where I did and do that, what else could you do, I asked myself?

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.