Category: Nostalgiaville

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O, Lucky Man!

A number of conversations I’ve been having recently have me reflecting on the role of good luck and good timing in what I only occasionally feel self-conscious referring to as my career — namely, the fact that the circumstances that allowed me to get where I am today no longer exist, despite all that happening in the past two decades.

It’s a sign of the ways in which “digital media” has evolved — and the rate at which it’s happened, for that matter — but every time I look behind me to try and recommend that others follow in my example to try to further their writing careers, I realize that I’m talking about worlds that simply aren’t there anymore… something that feels especially surreal, given that, as I was coming up, I was moving in unchartered territory that hadn’t existed just a handful of years prior, either. Forget about the internet boom; the more I think about it, the more I realize that I came up in an internet burp.

The democratization of media that the internet appeared to offer — the very thing that allowed someone like me, with no training or, let’s be honest, special skill, to find an actual, real career as a writer — was, in retrospect, a temporary aberation that happened almost by accident as companies struggled to adapt to whatever the internet economy was going to become. I managed to sneak in while the lava was cooling, and before the continents shifted into place. Doors didn’t just close behind me, they burst into flame and ceased to exist entirely. (It was probably the lava’s fault, in this tortured metaphor.)

I’ve always credited my job to luck: to knowing the right people by accident, to being in the right place at the right time. But the more the internet becomes what it is, the more that I see how it devalues the “content” it relies upon to exist, the more I realize that the luckiest part of all was being there in the era in which no-one had really figured anything out, and was still willing to try stuff to see what stuck.

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You Just Can’t Stop

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.

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One Man and His

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.

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The Double, Triple, Hidden Life of Me

In rediscovering the fictions of my youth, I’ve been remembering the world as I imagined it as an impressionable teenager, filled with romance and an imagination fueled by European arthouse movies where melancholy was almost certainly the order of any given day. I couldn’t swear to what prompted by interest in the movies of Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ilk — I feel as if, at some point in my mid-teens, I told myself that my thing was going to be that I was a movie fan and so I bought the magazines and the books I thought that was supposed to entail, and suddenly I was let loose in a world of influences and stories I had no business in.

(What prompted this belief that I was into The Art of Cinema? I genuinely have no recollection, but I do remember subscribing to Empire and Sight and Sound at an inexplicably young age, even if the latter was something I only read a handful of times before I lost interest in how humorless and sterile it all seemed at the time; Empire, which sought to bring a music paper sensibility to movie writing, was far more my speed and I kept that up for years after.)

However I ended up in that mindset, there was a point in my mid-teens where I was increasingly watching European movies about the existential weight of the world in which effortlessly beautiful actresses pouted and frowned when faced with the meaningless cruelty of the world, surrounded by old men who also frowned but found new life when faced with their decades-younger, naive-but-somehow-wise muses. (I still love things like The Double Life of Veronique or Three Colours Red, but it’s easy to see in them the roots of what would become the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliche of American cinema years later, alas.)

Rewatching such movies now, they’re still filled with breathtaking, aching moments of real beauty, of human frailty and kindness and all kinds of feelings that words struggle to conjure. But I also see in them the beginnings of my overly romantic, melancholy nature and a tendency to tell myself a story in which sadness and pain can be noble or meaningful when the reality is something far more banal and empty. If I hadn’t fallen for such pretty sorrow in these movies as a teenager, how much of my life would’ve been different years, decades, later?

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Missed Connection (Film Edition)

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.

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I Remember You

While looking through old, quasi-recovered files from the distant past the other week, I came across something that was a real time capsule: a document that was, from what I could make out, a collection of everything I’d written on that particular computer in the year 1999; notes to myself, emails to friends, an entire report for something I was working on, and so on. (Thinking back, I’m not sure it was everything everything; I’m pretty sure I was editing the newsletter for an arts group for a time and wrote stuff for that which doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. I might be wrong, though.)

It’s very strange, revisiting that document and seeing where my head was at, at the time, and also just the way I thought, back then. I don’t mean that in the sense of, “what was I thinking” but literally, the method and sequence of my thoughts. I had an shorthand in much of what I was writing, and a language and cadence that I can vaguely remember but which also very much reads like the work of someone else. There are moments I don’t see myself in, and others where I wish I was still that person; there are sentences I couldn’t even imagine writing now, and others that I can see every keystroke being typed in my head with a worrying clarity.

I can’t remember why I saved all of these things in one document at the time; I’m not sure if I meant it as a message in a bottle, an important document of a particular time in my life — ironically, nothing was really happening at that time for me, although everything felt so filled with possibility — or simply that I was being particularly anal for reasons that didn’t exist beyond maybe this will be useful someday for some reason. Reading it all over 25 years later, when I’m literally twice as old as I was when I was writing it, feels like a message from the past that helps put everything in perspective, and reconnect with at least one of the whos I used to be, at the same time. It’s sobering and welcome at the same time.

Hello, whoever I used to be. Hope I don’t disappoint you too badly.

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It Looks Like We Made It

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.

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Your Memories On

I don’t use Facebook, much. If this had been, say, a year or so ago, I would’ve told you that I didn’t use it at all, because that was before I’d had to sign in daily for work reasons — suddenly, I was one of the people responsible for Popverse’s Facebook presence! — but, even with those daily visits, I find myself keeping to myself when it comes to personal business. I don’t post on there, and while I quietly, silently peruse the feed of friends and former friends telling me what they’re up to and what they’re watching, eating, or complaining about, I don’t even hit the Like or Comment buttons to let them know I’m out there. I’m a ghost.

For a long time, that’s because I was on Twitter instead; that was my chosen social media, up until… a year ago? Perhaps a little more? I pulled away from that slightly when Elon Musk bought the site, and then continued to step even further out the door every day since. Today, I’m barely there except for, again, work reasons. But even those seem less and less worthwhile, as Twitter (which is now, officially, “X” as of a few weeks back, twitter.com redirecting entirely and signing everyone out in the process) becomes more and more noise and no signal, just bots and right wing idiots filling up the feed and twisting algorithms for whatever fucking purpose seemed like an idea at the time.

Back to Facebook, though. I stopped posting there at some point because, in the marriage I was in at the time, Facebook belonged to my wife while Twitter was “mine.” It’s funny to think about that now; an early division of labor and digital assets years before we split. It made it easier when we did split, though, because it wasn’t as if we’d be tripping over each other. I remember, when I changed my status to “divorced,” the system asked me if I wanted to mute her posts to save myself from pain. There’s some kind of Black Mirror-esque irony there, if I’d wanted to look for it.

Facebook still feels very “not for me,” which is funny to consider when it offers me alerts with titles like “Your Memories on Facebook” on a daily basis. I have no memories on Facebook — not real ones, anyway, not meaningful ones or anything that actually connects me to the platform in a manner that I’d find myself missing it if it disappeared. Instead, when I click on those alerts, all I see are memes or posts without context from more than a decade ago, feeling like radio signals out of another life.

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All Over The World Tonight

Due to a combination of this year being my 50th birthday, a short burst of free time, and being inspired by someone else’s collection of old zines, I spent a couple hours recently looking through old files of work from… well, a long, long time ago. How long ago? If I tell you that most of the files were impossible to open because the platform that created them stopped being supported by their makers more than a decade ago, that might give you a clue. (Yes, it was a depressing discovery; I should have turned them all into PDFs when I had the chance.)

However, this dive into my own nostalgia did help me discover something I hadn’t realized, and which felt quite special, surprisingly: this month marks the 25th anniversary of the time the Scottish Arts Council paid me to go to Venice to visit and write about the Biennale for that year… which means that this is the 25th anniversary of the first professional writing gig I ever had.

That this happens the year I turn 50 — meaning that I have quite literally been a professional writer for half my life, which I genuinely hadn’t realized — feels quite the discovery, and an unexpected gift to me, the man who remains attached to signs and wonders and numerology despite not being good at math.

It’s a bit of a cheat to say that was the start of my professional writing career, maybe, despite it being technically true — I did, after all, get paid to go and write about the experience — it was close to a decade later before I got paid to write again, so maybe this counts as a preview of what was to come rather than the start of a career. (I had to move countries and spend some time in telesales before I really got started, as it turned out.) But I still remember how it felt to be told that it was happening, and the feeling that maybe people wanted to read what I had to say and how that felt like a responsibility and an honor and the start of something unexpected and important.

It was, even if that took awhile to arrive. I’m glad I realized it was the 25th anniversary while it was still the 25th anniversary, if that makes sense.

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The Other Two Were With Me

Out of nowhere, I suddenly remember the excitement I felt about the tour program for RE.M.’s Monster tour in 1996; even more than how excited I was at the gig itself — which was pretty fucking excited, because they were still one of my favorite bands by that point and there I was, seeing them live — was the weird, inexplicable electricity that flowed through my brain as I flipped through the program again and again in the days and weeks afterwards.

It wasn’t a misplaced early nostalgia for the concert that left me so thrilled. It was, instead, the excitement of the way that program looked, the way in which it approached the design and the very thinking behind that design. Remember, I was in art school studying graphic design at the time, and with teachers who were very very rigid and fixed in their approach to the subject; at some point in their lives, they’d heard the maxim “form follows function,” and it became their entire way of life — it informed all of their thinking on the idea of graphic design and they couldn’t see any further.

With this tour booklet, though, the exact opposite seemed true. Flush with the financial freedom that came with commercial success in the 1990s music scene and still informed by a left field visual approach that they brought with them from their indie days, the R.E.M. program was gloriously pointless and indulgent: oversized, full color, with different paper stock for particular pages and images that had no purpose beyond “feel,” or looking cool. There were pages where the dominant element was a photo of TV static or tin foil put through a scanner so it was curiously, colorfully, reflective. Things were upside down or entirely absent from where they “should” have been. Form followed whim, and whimsy, in that very 1990s manner.

I returned to that tour program repeatedly over the next year or so when it came to my schoolwork. Not stealing anything directly (I was not so sensible, nor so bold), but trying to absorb the attitude and approach to it by osmosis. Remembering how freeing it felt today, I wonder if I’m still trying to replicate what it meant even now.