Tag: You Know You Grew Up In the Nineties When…

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Doll Parts

I’ve been listening to this a lot today. Back in the nineties, when grunge was still a thing, I listed to a lot more Hole than I did Nirvana. Sharing it here ’cause I’m in a retro kind of mood, and ’cause I’ve apparently never seen the clip.

Journal

Haircut

I would be showing you a picture of my freshly-shorn scalp right now, but for the fact that instagram is being uncooperative. Instead I’ll have to link that shit and leave it up to you to be pro-active if you want to mock my new hair-do. Don’t be shy about that shit either – it’s quite a mockable haircut once you get started. The short version, for those who aren’t inclined to follow the link, is that I recently went from my long-haired grunge-kid do back to the “seriously, just pull out the clippers and shave my damn head” look that seems to bother the hell out of hairdressers when you walk in with hair longer than six inches. It’s a process I go through ever two years or so, whereupon I start growing my hair out again. Mostly I do it because my hair only works in these two states – in-between it’s a mess of kinks and spit-curls

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence. And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans).