Someone asked me the other day to describe the "bouquinistes" I mentioned here recently. The best I could come up with is they look like Dumpsters by the Seine. But that seems inadequate, non? Sure enough, as this picture proves, they're so much more than that: they're more like Dumpsters by the Seine with racks of postcards in between. And you can find everything at them from London travel guides (©1978, sunbleached beyond recognition) to Tintin porn. Lest you think them frivolous.
2. Nothing like nostalgia for remembering the past sentimentally
Lately, I've noticed a real surge in blogs celebrating kiddie culture of the '80s and '90s -- advertising, toys, books.* I tend to dig these blogs myself, but what astounds me is that most people seem to enjoy them on a level beyond euphoria ("OHMYGOD!!!! My sister and I TOTALLY had that My Little Pony / box of cereal / (insert thing here)**!!!!") What is it about these sort of reminiscences that gets to us so much? If I had to guess, I'd say -- call me a softy, but this is how I really feel -- our brains are fried from having spent those decades looking at one too many Lisa Frank products.
This is somebody else's photo, but I once had that dolphin notebook myself. At age 12, I used it to write a story called Four Days in Heck, which I still think showed promise despite its lack of small details like making sense.
3. And speaking of....
I realized this morning, following a memory trigger not worth relating, that I still remember all the lyrics to Pocahontas, a film which I have not thought about consciously since about 1996. Yet there they are, all salted away for the day when the only thing standing between me and starvation will be my remembering the words to "Colors of the Wind." Why?? WHY???? Not as in "WHY DO I REMEMBER THEM????" but as in, "WHY ARE THEY SOOOO BAAAAD?????"
Continuing on this here nostalgia theme: I had a Pocahontas doll, whose dress was supposed to do magical sparkly things when you took her out in the sun. The manufacturers didn't count on the fact that, for certain consumers, this would translate to the FLORIDA sun, which would instead cause the doll to burst into magical flames.*** Although I guess this counts as a sparkly thing.
* Seriously, how many kinds of girl-groups could there BE?
** Ha ha
*** Okay, okay, technically this never happened, but she did become sunbleached to the point of resembling Casper the Friendly If No Longer Ethnically Diverse Disney Princess.
1 comment:
I do love the nostalgia myself. It can be a lot of fun. Though there's also great fun to be had in ripping on the stuff that's current.
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