It's a nostalgia thing

[andygates]

As a professional thirtysomething geek I am expected to have a healthy nostalgia for a childhood full of 8-bit gaming and Raleigh Choppers.  And, true to form, I do.  Distance has mellowed even white dog poo to something bathed in the warm Hovis glow of long hot summers and no responsibilities beyond the paper round I used to fill the BIFAB Fund jar.  (BIts For Andy's Bike, in case you were wondering: I started early with 531c and Campag Gran Sport)

Some retro tat is already mainstream cool, or at least geek cool.  It's acceptable for us to spend a bit of our wedge not reliving the 80s so much as acquiring props to illustrate and accompany our back-stories.  Space Hopper.  Radioactive spider.  Pinball table.  It's all origin stories and since they didn't kill us, they're safe. 

There's even Ostalgia, hankering after the Communist Menace (or in the case of former East Germans, grumbling "it was better under the stasi" which seems bizarre until you see it).  Red stars and Cyrillic lettering, and somehow it's easy to forget that back then they were the guys who were going to nuke us all - forget the school assignment we did on targets and kill zones which finished with real relief that we were close enough to Brize Norton to go up in the fireball and not linger around coughing up our lungs like they did in Threads or When The Wind Blows.  Back when the USA was this shining bright clever energetic thing, when my pyjamas crackled with static and were printed with the first Space Shuttle (and I remember seeing the first launches on Newsround too, totally awed).

So here's the kitschy rub: what about retro smut?  Do you remember the first mucky magazine passed around between classes at school?  Fond memories of that mag found rain-soaked in a layby?  Tacky, for sure, but how about the title that's as respectable and retro-cool as it could be: Playboy?  It's cool to reminisce about getting a black eye from Swingball, but what can you say if your nostalgia de jour is for a certain mid-1980s skin mag?  Same sort of price - mint $35, good $8 (let's face it, nobody wants a skin mag "slightly foxed" except furries).  Collectible.  But what do you say, really?  "No, I got the September 1985 one for the John Huston interview, ignore Madonna being unlike a virgin."

And anyway, the July edition's star interview was with Rob Reiner and I don't think they even had one of Harlan Ellison's opaquely witty articles.  No, it was the black-and-white and tastefully posed shots of Grace Jones and everyone's favourite MSc chemical engineer, Fullbright scholar and seven-language karate master, Dolph Lundgren.  Deep-contrast black-and-white, playing with the skin tones and the hard 80's hair and the hard 80's bodies: Mapplethorpe does mucky snaps. 

Somehow nostalgia has even managed to bathe retro porn in that Hovis light (Ridley, we hardly knew you).  But while a collection would be cool, a single edition wouldn't, would it? 

Comments

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I do!

We all passed around Judy Blume's Wifey and dog-eared the sex scenes, and those damn V.C. Andrews books were shared, too. I happened to have the mom who read the smut, so I tended to be the smuggler. People were rather shocked, too, since I didn't swear until I was a Junior in high school.

Those "Flowers in the Attic" books were awful, but not as bad as the movie they made from them!

Sci-fi didn't really exist where I grew up. My mom and stepfather belonged to The Prosperos when they picked us up again after their stint in L.A. They brought all sorts of interesting books with them, like Rape of the Ape, and I read them all for lack of a better thing to do.

Ultimately, music videos were the best smut at that point, though.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Music videos still are the best smut. Have you watched late-night music TV lately?

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Not too many, as I can never remember which channel has the music I like.

My IV therapist, however, has CMT on all the time when I'm there, so for two hours, I am treated to country music videos. Kenny Chesney's video is barely legal...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

But of course!

I'm just being over-defensive. I almost bought some poweriser sprung stilts yesterday (ebay impulse! bad!) and could only think of using them as digitigrade leg props, dressing up as a werewolf and running across Dartmoor in the moonlight dark.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I just had an almost perfect recall of the scene from whichever it was of Lace and Lace 2 with the goldfish. (And the billiard table, I think, unless that was a different bit)

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Judy Blume. That scene with the glass coke bottle shudder.

Mind you, I read Silverberg's "The Book of Skulls" at Primary and handed that round because of the homosexual sex scenes. The book was removed from the school library. We've got that somewhere.

Mostly, for me, 80s literature revolves around the sort of books you could get from the book club at school I remember cutting out the thin, glossy form from the leaflet and taking it in with the envelope containing a few pound notes and some coins. The Girl With the Silver Eyes; The Silver Brumby -- ahhh. My synaesthesia was taking its toll even then.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

You read The Girl With the Silver Eyes, too? Do you remember the protagonist's name?

The newer copies over here have changed it, I think, because it's not what I remember it as and there was an easy way to keep it in your head...

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

I've found a book review from 1997 that calls her Katie. I don't remember. I don't remember a whole lot from the last 34 years, and it's impossible to predict what random details I will either remember or dig out from somewhere. It's always worth asking but don't necessarily expect an answer.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

That's what I have found lately, too. I'm going to do my best to find a library copy from the right decade to see if it wasn't "Ellie Grogan," which "sounds like something you'd say when you burp."