Category: Nostalgiaville

Upon discovering my current favorite “new” podcast First Thirst — in which guests talk about their first celebrity crushes, and what if anything that says about who they are today — I found myself thinking back to the various media figures kid me had a crush on, and wondering if there was a through line. (Spoilers: there’s not, I don’t think.)

What was more surprising than anything, I think, was trying to think back to childhood celebrity crushes and struggling to think of any before when I was, say, 12 or so. I can think of precisely one — Marmalade Atkins as played by Charlotte Coleman, whom I just found out died astonishingly young at age 33, which I find surprisingly sad for someone I hadn’t given any thought to in literally decades. I daren’t look back at any video of the old Marmalade Atkins TV shows for fear of utter embarrassment and shame at whatever was going on in my 7- and 8-year-old brain at the time.

At least Marmalade was flesh-and-blood, as opposed to so many of my latter “celebrity” crushes, the majority of whom weren’t just fictional, but comic book characters: I’m enough of a cliche that of course I fell for the charms of the X-Men’s Rogue, all faux Southern accent and a bashful personality matched with bombastic body and unrealistic hair that demanded the eye’s attention whenever she appeared on the page. (I was shy too, and wished I had someone like that was real, and would notice me! Ah, the embarrassing mindset of the pubescent mess I was.) My crush on Lois Lane probably started around here, too, and that one has persisted on and off for decades; those who know why, know.

I picked up my first issue of Deadline in 1989, aged 14, and almost immediately had a crush on Pippa from Wired World, a fact that Chloe — who not only looks like Pippa but holds her up as an inspiration in multiple ways — finds endlessly amusing to this day.

In amongst all of this, though, were the non-celebrity crushes, the people I ran into in real life and pined for silently. Far more than any fictional or televisual crush, these were the figures that shaped me and my desires entirely unknowing, because I never ever came out and told them how much I liked them. To do so was to risk rejection and embarrassment, as I was all too aware of at the time. (Especially as I was far from the most charming or attractive child on the playground; some things never change.) Perhaps I should have paid more attention to all the unreal crush potential in my world at the time. They would never have rejected me; they didn’t even know I existed, after all.

I’ve been thinking about generations more lately, inspired both by Jeff Lester talking about how Generation X is only ever going to have one U.S. President it produced — Barack Obama, because everyone that followed was from the Boomer generation, and once they’re gone, the next wave will likely be Millennials — and reading a piece about Millennials and their lack of cultural footprint in the grand scheme of things.

I remember reading Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Copeland when I was in my first year of art school. At the time, even back then, it felt as if I was catching up on some big cultural touchstone that wasn’t about me and mine, but instead a historical document about That Which Had Come Before. That was back in 1993, when the book was just two years old, but the fact remains: Generation X, as a concept, felt like something that was for people older than me.

I’ve struggled with that in the years since. I get that I’m officially Generation X — I was born in 1974, and according to the internet, Generation X encompasses people born between 1965 and 1980 — but I’ve always secretly believed that I was part of some secret mid-generation that came of age in the mid-1990s and belongs between Gen X and Millennials. Is this because I’m British and Britpop ruined my cultural sensibilities to that heavy a degree? Potentially; Copeland’s Generation X feels such a particularly American book that the entire name feels like it belongs to Americans who listened to Nirvana and Pavement and not gangly, awkward British folk who liked Pulp and Blur and owned a Northern Uproar single or two. (A depressing aside: if there was that secret mid-generation for British folk my age, we’d almost certainly be called the Oasis Generation or something like that. Insert a heavy sigh here.)

I feel as if, despite talk of Gen X and Boomers, it wasn’t until Millennials started having a cultural voice that the idea of generational shift became mainstream — all of which makes it more ironic to see the argument that Millennials are the first generation to lack a cultural identity that’s unique to them, or to create music or literature or art that is wholly original and not a remix of what came before. The piece I was reading about this argued that American Millennials’ most memorable aesthetic should be described as “Lumberjackcore,” which feels at once fitting — the mustaches! The obsession with authenticity as an attainable concept that can be adopted! — and the most cruel put-down.

Generation X, by contrast, gave the world techno and raves and… is that it? Perhaps when you look at everything in this manner, it’s the finest perspective to have to fight off the common wisdom: everyone might think the Boomers were squares who ruined it for everyone else, but they were the hippies and the punks. You don’t get hip-hop if it wasn’t for the Boomers, either. Food for thought, perhaps.

I had a thought, the other day, upon realizing that a bunch of comics I’ve been buying in back issues lately aren’t ones that I collected back in the day, but ones that I read from the collection of my best friend in high school; I realized that I had inherited the issues originally when he quit reading comics himself, and I thought, back when he outgrew comics, just like everyone else at the time except for me and the other shy, painfully quiet loners I’d see at the local comic book store.

I thought that, and then I realized that… that probably doesn’t happen anymore. At some point in the decades since I was a teenager, buying and reading comics became, if not mainstream then at least not something that is a topic of open derision by your peer group. I’m almost nostalgic about the whole concept now, looking back.

I remember the point when I thought to myself, oh, I’m a comic collector now, and I can even remember the specific comic book issue when I realized that I wasn’t just reading comics off-handedly; it was something that was specifically an active interest, something that I wanted to do and do intentionally. (That was Uncanny X-Men #185, by the way, by Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr.; I don’t know why that issue was the one, but it was. It still took ten months for me to call myself a collector, though; I didn’t do that until I bought Uncanny X-Men #195.)

Throughout my late teens, I remember that buying and reading comics was a particularly solitary activity, that I’d find the stores and go there myself or drag along a friend or even family member despite their obvious disinterest. It was something that I kept to myself, as much as I’d occasionally attempt to convert people I thought could be like-minded and easily convinced. It rarely worked; for the most part, it was something I did and kept to myself.

There’s really is something I almost miss about all of that. As lonely as it was — and it was! — there was also something… exciting about feeling as if I spoke a secret language that no-one else around me understood, or the thrill of realizing that other people could understand, when that connection was made. The world is different now, where everyone doesn’t just recognize Spider-Man and Superman and Batman, but Metamorpho, Shang-Chi, and Moon Knight, as well. How did that even happen?

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.