shituationist:

 there’s a perfect sociocultural congruence between [Sonic Youth] as individuals and their audience: that burgeoning of a vast college educated middle class audience for “alternative rock” in the 80s and 90s: graduates wanting something a little bit artier and recherche than pop, metal or hardcore, but nothing too foreboding or intimidating: SY fitted the bill perfectly: indeed, Moore and Gordon are the mirror image of their audience: nice, vaguely bohemian/arty middle class urban professionals: Gordon’s links to the NY artworld very symptomatic: and of course art too became an attractive and materially rewarding profession for middle class hipsters in the 90s….

Ray Brassier quoted by Mark Fisher

frickyeah1990s:

drug users from a 90s anti-drug commercial

slartibartfastibast:

https://twitter.com/TheFaction1776/status/1085293090288558081

At this distance all the street art I hear about in Shepard Fairey’s old Hollywood stomping grounds these days is right-wing, either The Faction or SABO.

(Hollywood the neighborhood hasn’t equaled “Hollywood” the industry since the 1940s)

There is a tradition of Gen X West Coast counter/subcultural right-cynicism though, expressed through humor and cartooning – Jim Goad and Nick “A. Wyatt Mann” Bougas at Answer Me!, Suck.com (large portions of which was absorbed by Reason magazine), Peter Bagge and Hate, John Swartzwelter writing for Army Man and The Simpsons

Really it was part of the same cultural ecosystem as Fairey and Adbusters, honestly as Spy and Vice and Bloom County and Life In Hell and Calvin & Hobbes tbh, even Beavis & Butthead/Daria, a Gen X disillusionment with/loathing of the normie world

But then that became the culture and got its edges softened and everyone forgot how to operate as a counterculture

(I was lately like “wow, Hard Times and Reductress AND Babylon Bee are all really good rn, why is all the good satire subculture-specific?” Then I realized The Onion’s “overeducated college town slacker with Thoughts about pop culture” was subculture at debut)

But now we’re cycling back out and it’s been rediscovered

bootleg-bill:

Some kind of hybrid Sailor Moon/Wedding Peach blanket ~  haruzumiya

I’m not too familiar with Sailor Moon but what an odd blanket

remember the ‘90s, when bisexuality was thought of not as the intermediate on a spectrum of orientation that went from straight to gay

but as the “anything that moves” position on a horny spectrum that went from prudish through to slutty to flasher with his trench coat open and “furry gay”?

::realizes that Terminator 2’s “the suburban vandal latchkey kids aren’t the apocalypse, they’re our salvation” was actually a pretty interesting take in 1991::

Sam and Cat looked like a perfectly good show to be 12 and masturbate to for the first time

In a long tradition stretching back to Alex Mack at least

y’all acting like Dan Harmon’s foot scenes are some kinda corruption, “this superpowered middle schooler can morph into a puddle of goo but when she reforms she’s naked and wet” was a conscious creative decision with writers and directors and costume supervisors and agents and managers and development execs and set tutors and hair and makeup people behind it in 1994

yesterdaysprint:

Life Magazine, April 1915

So I remember once telling (to Freddie de Boer, re: a fight with Sady Doyle in like 2008, cause I’m some kinda Zelig/Forrest Gump of The Discourse) about how Salon had started putting its woman-themed articles under the heading “Life” – which is a classic newspaper women’s section title, I think the Philly Inquirer used it growing up - even though the still-kinda-static early-CMS HTML publishing system kept putting them in the /mwt/ directory after the original branding, “Mothers Who Think”

It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form

People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.

You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.

Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all

Pentium® III

Garbage - Medication (Acoustic)

Now, in retrospect it MAY seem that U2’s Bono best anticipated the post-Cold War First World order, an alliance between billionaires, popular media, and Third Way politicians lubricated by happy-clappy themes and pointless conferences where everyone reassured each other they matter

But REMEMBER, Guns N’Roses’ Axl Rose rode unstable ‘80s machismo into early ‘90s dominance, then just cruised on his reputation while for more than a decade the press eagerly awaited the follow-up, “Chinese Democracy”

Dune - Rainbow to the Stars (1996)

This was the source of my high school senior yearbook quote: “Ride the rainbow to the stars/keep the faith right in your heart”

At the time it was an amazing own on the concept of yearbook quotes and immediately afterwards I was embarrassed by it bcuz there’s no proof it’s ironic but now know what? It doesn’t have to be.

halcyonjester:

@lesserknownwaifus

Someone just put Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” on the jukebox and that takes me back

Specifically, back before the internet (or 14.4k at best) and being like 12, how useful her videos were to masturbate to

(Toni Braxton’s “You’re Makin’ Me High”, tho)

dishwasherultimate1910:

Can not contain my hype, so here are the ladies of #Genlock shame I cannot be at NYCC to see the new infohttps://twitter.com/Dishwasher1910/status/1047615552703922183

Okay you get that this title is a pun that explicitly calls back to the mid-‘90s era of American anime fandom, a “genlock” was how you synchronized two video signals together (i.e. the original Japanese off of laserdiscs or original broadcast/satellite wildfeed on one hand, and Amiga/Mac-generated English subtitles on the other) to merge them to create fansubs

Growing up in the 90s, at one point the local car dealership mistakenly printed up letterhead with our number listed as their fax number and for like 7 years we got two calls a week that were just beeps and shrieks as a machine tried to handshake

Also this was the high era of live telemarketers (usu. from the low-wage “New South”, not yet offshored to India and the Phillipines) who “would always call during dinner” (bcuz they called between when people came home from work and when they went to sleep, bcuz the target market no longer had stay-at-home home economists)

Now that I think of it as the decade went on you picked up more often to dropped calls, as computer programs to minimize downtime optimized more ruthlessly

(The big ‘90s innovation was Wal-Mart with its ruthless procurement optimization, they made your sales staff fly to them in Bentonville and pitch on margins alone and you couldn’t treat them to steak or strippers or prostitutes to make that human connection)

Anyway point is even for all that it was less annoying than robocalls now, I’ve had my phone on DND for like 2 years

Every so often I remember that Clerks is set in a world where angels and demons are real and Alanis Morissette is God

A Cheeky List of 90s Films About Fucking Teenagers!

With the Kavanaugh nomination fight we’re being reminded how openly exploitative ‘80s teen sex comedies were, full of nudity and what would now read as rape played for laughs!

But while young flesh may never have been as hot a commodity as the decade that saw top-line porn star Traci Lords revealed as 15 with a fake ID, and preteen sex symbol turned teen sex symbol Brooke Shields in her prime filming the “incestuous sexual awakening” movie Blue Lagoon naked, the ‘90s saw their fair share of adolescent sexuality, as the victorious young Pro- side of the Sexual Revolution inherited mainstream culture!

But with tumblr tots stumbling around scoffing that teenagers are MINORS, they’re SEXLESS INNOCENT UNDERAGE MINORS, we’ve obviously lost touch with the Miramax Age and need reminding, so check these out!

Aerosmith’s Alicia Silverstone Trilogy – “Cryin”, “Amazing”, “Crazy” (1993-1994)

When ‘70s groupie sex rockers Aerosmith looked to make a ‘90s comeback, they turned to the period’s leading art form - the music video. The music was bluesy crap, so good thing they had sexy sixteen-year-old actress Alicia Silverstone for these three videos!

Cryin’ – Tattoos, navel rings, flannel-clad teen suicide and bungee jumping! How ‘90s is that!

Amazing – A nerd uses video editing software to have VR motorcycle cybersex with the girl from the last video! How ‘90s is that!

Crazy – Catholic school girls playing hooky! Shoplifting! Stripping! Disrupting the farm economy! All with lesbian chic undertones! The other girl is lead singer/widemouth bass Steven Tyler’s 16-year-old daughter Liv in her breakthrough role! How ‘90s is that!

Mallrats (1995) – At one point the protagonists meet Trish “The Dish” Jones, a 15-year old representation of the transition from Kevin Smith’s burnout 80s adolescence to the new neurotic professional-bound model – she fucks a lot of guys, but diligently records it for a book she’s publishing (“Boregasm: A Study of ‘90s Male Sexual Prowess”) to feature on her college applications!

In the end this is how slacker Brodie beats the career-oriented-Ben-Affleck romantic rival who wants to steal his disaffected thus vulnerable girlfriend and fuck her in a very uncomfortable place: they interrupt a live filming of a dating show with the video of Ben Affleck having anal sex with her!

So he gets carted off for “statutory rape”, as if Trish weren’t the New Empowered Woman in control all along, serves him right for trying to play straight and uptight against the true “alternative” culture! So he gets thrown in prison! To be raped in the ass! All coming after Silent Bob slapstick slams through a changing room wall and sees some titties, and the boys go to a topless three-nippled fortune teller!

American Beauty (1999) - In this middlebrow masterpiece, dissatisfied Kevin Spacey wants to fuck his daughter’s cheerleader classmate, and has a famous fantasy sequence where rose petals fall on (and conveniently clump on) her naked body!

Meanwhile his daughter (Thora Birch)’s boyfriend makes a high school art video about a plastic bag so moving that she shows him her tits from adjacent bedroom windows in a scene I KNOW that “You Belong With Me” video director Roman White has seen!

Finally Kevin Spacey has a shot at the cheerleader and is like “nah, this is about my midlife crisis and it’s bullshit to put that on you”, then his Marine Corps neighbor kills him for not being gay enough!

Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) – in this coming-of-age film about class and belonging, Natasha Lyonne is a fourteen-year-old on the seedy edges of incredible wealth, complicated by the fact she’s horny as hell, just sprouted a huge pair of knockers, and it’s California in the ‘70s!

Dazed and Confused (1993) –That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I keep getting older, they stay the same age.”

In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!

Almost Famous (2000, cut me a break) – “Let’s deflower the kid!”

In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!

American Pie (1999) - not only does it have Jason Biggs fucking a pie, band geek Alyson Hannigan losing her virginity talking dirty, and a “secretly broadcast the exchange student as she changes” bit that goes overboard when she starts masturbating, but also Stifler’s Mom, the zipless Mrs. Robinson who introduced America to the term “MILF”!

The Virgin Suicides (1999) – adapted from an acclaimed novel, shot beautifully by Sofia Coppola and set to a diaphanous soundtrack by Air, this feature-length Lana Del Rey video sees three mid-70s teenage girls mess up a trio of teenage boys for life by killing themselves ‘cause their parents don’t want them to fuck!

Romeo + Juliet (1996) - the teens are less nude and explicit than the ‘68 Polanski version, but this contemporary-set, contemporary-scored, original-dialogue Shakespeare adaptation is just a really really good movie!

Calvin Klein Jeans campaign (1995) – they’d gone to this well before with 1980 ads with Brooke Shields purring “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (like panties!) but this mid-90s campaign used young models in an overexposed, wood-paneled basement responding to off-camera urging so as to evoke the aesthetics of child pornography, and were roundly protested by critics who apparently recognized the aesthetics of child pornography!

This was also the aesthetic of Fiona Apple’s 1996 Criminal video. Several years later these ads graduated from college and became American Apparel!

BONUS: Ghost World (2001) – From a graphic novel by Daniel Klowes, who with Klosterman and Kunkel was a backbone of the 2000s Brooklyn literary scene that inspired Achewood before it degenerated into girlblogging, a story of two outsider girls who meet in art class back when outsider girls dressed like Daria or Janeane Garafalo, and start sexually grooming a skeevy older man (Steve Buscemi)!

Scarlett Johansson plays a girl who hasn’t yet realized she’s Scarlett Johansson – in every scene you’re like “for a shirt that shows off what a great rack she has, it could show it off a lot better” – but for the second time in this list Thora Birch gets more action!