Ever since I started this series, I’ve been meaning to write a post about Chris Foss. For a sci-fi nerd growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, it was impossible not to see and be familiar with Foss’s artwork. After all, he illustrated more than 1,000 book covers during his long and celebrated career. His style is so distinct and memorable that one can recognize it on a bookshelf (or a computer screen) from twenty yards away.
I remember seeing some of his sci-fi book covers back in the 1970s and being struck by their originality and vividness. He specialized in images depicting spaceships or futuristic craft, which he rendered with a strange, industrial-style realism that was new and striking. In particular, his spaceships look like real, constructed things with visible welds and spanners and plates, often painted in bright, almost nautical color schemes. He also likes to depict smoke. Or mist. Or dust. Something to give the otherwise static vacuum of space some drama and sense of motion.
His work was so good, in fact, that no one seemed to care whether the depicted image had anything to do with the plot of the book itself. Often, it did not. But that didn’t matter. The cover always said two things: science fiction and drama. And that was enough. It was plenty.
While I was doing a bit of research for this post, I was delighted to learn that Mr. Foss is still alive and still working. You can see more of his artwork on his website, which I encourage everyone to visit.
If you were a nerdy poor kid growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, you probably watched a lot of public television. Starting with kid shows like Sesame Street and the Electric Company, you graduated in your teens to science shows like Nova and edgy entertainment shows like Monty Python and surreal action series like The Prisoner, which PBS stations played late at night.
As for myself, I also watched a lot of PBS news, especially The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. And Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill moyers. If MacNeil and Lehrerwere the Kings of PBS news, then Bill Moyer was the high-ranking courtier. Moyers, who passed away last week, specialized in thoughtful and intelligent interviews with brilliant people of various stripes. As a would-be teenage intellectual, I really loved and appreciated these shows, and they introduced me to a lot of very smart artists, politicians, and writers. Chief among these was the iconic scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell. Moyers’s now-famous interviews with Campbell, conducted at George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch (Lucas was inspired by Campbell’s writing when he penned the Star Wars saga), were probably the pinnacle of both men’s careers.
I’ve been a fan of Campbell ever since, and also of Moyers. A one-time Baptist preacher, Moyers was a gentle, kind-spirited man who never descended into sentimentality or fatuous optimism. He was, rather, a first-rate journalist. And God knows there are very few of those these days.
Moyers has been the subject of many on-line tributes in the past few days, including this one by the excellent historian Jonathan Alter.
Let’s face it. New Wave music has a bad rap. It’s associated with bad 1980s movies and “Old Wave” nostalgia night at your local dance club.
Having grown up in the era of both punk music and New Wave, I can say with some authority that New Wave music, at its best, was every bit as powerful—and a lot more meaningful—than punk. In fact, New Wave gave us some of the best music of the 20th Century. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Gary Numan. And on and on.
One of my favorite songs of the era is this little number by Romeo Void. You might remember it from an obscure (but not bad) 1980s movie called Reckless starring Aiden Quinn and Daryll Hannah, who dance to the song in one surprisingly effective scene.
I like the song because it’s like a mash-up of The Sex Pistols and a San Francisco poetry-slam. It hits.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way: Something Wicked this Way Comes is not a science fiction novel. It’s dark fantasy, and, in my opinion, a precursor to many famous books in that genre from the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Erin Morgenstern, and others.
However, Ray Bradbury’s books were always sold in the science fiction aisle when I was a kid. And I read all his books thinking they were science fiction. (I didn’t read fantasy back then.) So, I’m shoe-horning him into my classic sci-fi book covers thread.
Having said all that, let me add that this is one of my favorite novels, not to mention Bradbury’s best. It’s the tale of two 13-year-old boys, Will and Jim, who have grown up next door to each other in 1930s Illinois. Will and Jim are almost exactly the same age, with Will being born one minute before midnight on October 30th and Jim being born one minute after midnight on October 31st. Yes, one boy is born a minute before Halloween begins and the other born a minute after. (Guess which one is the “bad” kid?)
It might seem like clunky symbolism, but in Bradbury’s prolix hands, it works. The duality between the introverted, good-natured Will and the adventurous, mischievous Jim—that is, between light and dark sides of our being—is repeated throughout the novel. Both boys are forced to confront their darker impulses when a demonic carnival arrives on the edge of town in the middle of the night. Will and Jim soon discover that the carnival is a vehicle for a bunch of malevolent, vampire-like beings who want nothing more to lure innocent people onto the midway and tempt them into evil.
The only person who believes the boys when they tell what they’ve seen is Will’s father, an older man who doubts his own strength and courage. Together, they challenge the men who run the carnival, Mr. Cougar and Mr. Dark (another light/dark duality) for the soul of the town.
I really like this cover—created by veteran illustrator David Grove—because it captures the nostalgia, magic, and dark wonder that are the great strengths of the novel. Specifically, it refers to a moment in the story when Mr. Dark wanders through the town looking for Will and Jim. He has the images of the boy tattooed on his palms, and he shows them to passersby to see if anyone recognizes them. It’s an extremely creepy scene in an amazing book. (It’s also the first moment when Will’s father shows his courage and guile in besting Mr. Dark.)
My appreciation for the cover is in no way diminished by the fact that it appears to be a poster tie-in with the film adaptation produced by Disney in 1983, depicting the likenesses of some of the actors (most notably, the great Jonathan Pryce, who performance as Mr. Dark is worth the price of admission all by itself).
Also, not long after Mr. Grove passed away, Tor.com published a tribute to him and his career. You can see it here…
Forget Van Halen. Forget Hendrix. Forget Clapton. Lindsey Buckingham is the greatest guitarist in the history of rock music. Don’t believe me? Listen to this song, “Trouble,” from his 1981 solo album Law and Order. If it doesn’t transport you to another plane of existence—yes, forgive the cliche; to an actual soundscape—then you need to get your ears checked.
Buckingham was, of course, the driving force behind Fleetwood Mac’s second incarnation, when they produced one of the greatest rock LPs of all time, Rumours. (When he joined the band, he insisted they also hire his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, who also had a bit to do with the group’s ultimate success.) As band leader Mick Fleetwood saw at the time, Buckingham is not just an incredible guitarist, he is also a phenomenally talented song-writer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer.
Getting back to his guitar playing, though, let me add that Buckingham uses an usual finger-picking technique—more like a banjo-player—which he employs in a variety of styles and with amazing creativity. That creativity is on full display here.
If you’ve ever gone to a dance club on “Old-Wave Night” when they play the greatest alterna-hits of the late 1970s and 80s, you’ve almost certainly heard this song. I, of course, am old enough to have heard it on its original run, when it still had complete cultural currency. (Personally, I think it still does.)
Killing Joke was not only one of the wittiest and most subversive bands of the era, they were one of the most talented. And hard-hitting. You know you’ve done something right when later classic bands such as Metallica, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, and Nirvana site you as an influence. In fact, Kurt Cobain liked Geordie Walker’s guitar playing so much that he borrowed from it heavily on Nirvana’s great hit, “Come as You Are.” As one of the song’s producers explained,
…we couldn’t decide between ‘Come as You Are’ and ‘In Bloom.’ Kurt [Cobain] was nervous about ‘Come as You Are’ because it was too similar to a Killing Joke song but we all thought it was still the better song to go with. And, he was right, Killing Joke later did complain about it.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, right?
I have a confession to make: I dream about shopping malls. Specifically, one shopping mall, the Oaks Mall here in Gainesville.
The “Collapsed Time” Effect of Vaporwave
After my parents’ divorce, I saw my mother mostly on the weekends, and one of our routine activities was to go to the mall. We would have lunch, see a movie, and wander around. Later, when I got into my teens, I spent a lot more time at the mall with my friends. We hit all the usual spots—the arcade, both bookstores (Waldenbooks and B. Dalton’s), the record store, Spencer’s Gifts, the toy store. And we did anything else we felt like.
Trappings of the 1980s, along with “Broken Sun” motif
We weren’t alone, of course. After the collapse of downtown America, the mall was the last remaining public square. In suburban America, particularly, it was also the only fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. Or a Saturday night, for that matter. When I entered high school and started going on dates, we often went to a movie at the mall. One of my most vivid memories is of how strange and eerie the mall felt after the movie let out at 11:00 or so, and we would walk through the empty, dark hall with all the shops closed and metal gates drawn down. It was one of my first experiences of liminal space, and it sticks with me even today.
In fact, it haunts my dreams. Literally. For when I dream of the Oaks Mall now, I often find myself lost among its corridors near closing time, the wings still busy with shoppers but with the crowd starting to thin out, little by little. Stranger still, my dream-mall is huge—the size of Manhattan Island, practically. A gigantic labyrinth of brand-name stores, all of which are in the early stages of shutting down for the night. (My subconscious, I think, is warning me that the mall is shutting down forever.) These dreams often end in a sense of panic as I realize I am on the wrong side of the mall from my friends, or my car, or whatever, and I will never be able to reach them/it in time before…what? Closing? It’s not clear, but whatever it is, it’s kind of scary.
Despite the disquieting nature of these dreams—or perhaps because of it—I find myself endlessly fascinated by what has come to be known as the Vaporwave aesthetic. Vaporwave is primarily a visual genre, marked by artistic images of 1980s culture. That is, computer graphics, shopping malls, the Miami skyline (alaMiami Vice), fast food restaurants, music videos, video stores, and old-style video games.
And neon. Lots and lots of neon.
Empty Mall / Liminal Space Vibe Typical of Vaporwave
The overriding effect is that of a hyper-real fantasy that feels like a time-portal back to the 1980s. I love these images because they somehow evoke the memory of that long ago time, at least for me. More accurately, they evoke the feeling I wanted to have at the timebutcould never quite capture. The feeling of an endless, prosperous, fun, high-tech future.
I think that this is the real power of nostalgia. A wise man once defined nostalgia as a fondness for a Time that never existed. I don’t think that’s quite right. Nostalgia is a fondness not for a lost time but for a lost hope—the hope one felt and in a familiar place and a long-ago time. A hope that, though never realized, still lingers in the heart.
That sense of lost opportunity is, I think, reflected in the very name of the genre itself, vaporwave, which is very similar to vaporware, a term coined in the 1980s to mean great-looking software that was promised by advertisers and corporations but which never actually materialized. It simply evaporated.
The same thing happened to our collective dreams back in the 1980s. My friends and I all hoped that we could look forward to a glorious future, one better than that of our parents’ and teachers’ generation. A future that would be made bright by the many technological revolutions (the digital revolution, especially) that were impacting every aspect of our culture: movies, TV, music, art, games, fashion, and even books. The haunting images of vaporwave reflect that lost dream—rather than the sterile reality—of the 1980s and ’90s.
Many vaporwave images seem to have a psychedelic “collapsed time” feel to them, as did many of the music videos and computer-generated short films of that era. The hippie generation had the psychedelic flower as their symbol. We had the computer-generated sun—the so-called “broken sun”—which seems to have been pulled directly from of a film poster or a television commercial from 1982.
As attracted as I am to vaporwave, I am equally drawn to its parallel music genre, synthwave. Like vaporwave, synthwave is characterized by the early computer-era vibe, as symbolized in synthesized music. Not actual synthesized music from the 1980s, of course, but rather music that sounds a lot like it, yet is somehow drained of all melodrama and false tension that characterized synth-music back then. Synthwave has a kind of purity to it. A simple beauty that surpasses the actual music of that time.
In other words, synthwave is to actual 1980s music what Andy Warhol was to actual advertisements of the 1950s. His silk screen images of Campbell’s soup cans looked almost exactly like actual soup cans, but larger, stylized, more vivid. They made the world really see Campbell’s soup cans—the sublime nature of everything, even a mass-produced soup can—for the first time. Warhol’s genius lay in his ability to show us the beauty and promise of something that was once central and even commonplace in our lives, even as it mocked (lovingly) that very same thing.
That’s what vaporwave does, too. Through the alchemy of art, it somehow humanizes the relentless, corporate-controlled media barrage of the 1980s. For me, and millions of others like me, it is literally the stuff that dreams are made of.
Or were made of, that is. Back in the day.
Lo-Poly, Computer-Generated Background with Broken Sun
Blatent Consumerism of the 1980s, both celebrated and mocked
Once again, it has taken me far too long to write a short tribute to a fine person who has passed away—Val Kilmer, who died of pneumonia on April 1. This time, it was more than just my workload that explains the delay. I had a bit of trouble discovering what I wanted to say about Kilmer, who was a great actor but also a bit of a cipher. A few years ago, I read his memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry, and I enjoyed it. I was struck, however, by how little Valmer says about his filmmaking experiences. For instance, he barely mentions the production of Tombstone, the film in which Kilmer had his most celebrated film performance—playing the famous gunfighter Doc Holliday—and from which the book’s title is taken. He says even less about the making of Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Kilmer portrays a talented but slightly crazy master-burglar with pitch-perfect ferocity.
This lack of detail was especially disappointing, to me, in part because Heat has my favorite action-sequence of all time—the shoot-out in Century City. More than any other actor in the scene, it’s Kilmer who makes it work, with his fluid transition from cool and controlled bank-robber to machine-gun wielding warrior. I read an autobiography written by a Navy Seal who wrote that he and his comrades once watched Heat together and were impressed by Kilmer’s magazine-changing speed in the film. High praise, indeed.
This reticence on Kilmer’s part to discuss his film-making career—the very aspect of his life that made him famous across the world—suggests to me that Kilmer was deeply ambivalent about being a movie star. I suspect that, like the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, Kilmer was simply too intelligent to think that movie-making was a worthy and serious endeavor. I also suspect that, like Burton, Kilmer was much happier as a stage actor. (His one-man show of Mark Twain was universally praised.)
Unfortunately, his ambivalence somehow bled into his performances whenever he played a leading man, as he did in several major films, none of which was terribly successful. He never seemed to really have his heart in it. But that self-doubt evaporated when he played supporting roles, and these are what he will be remembered for: Iceman in the Top Gun films; Doc Holliday in Tombstone; Chris in Heat. In each of the movies, Kilmer seemed to bring his entire soul to the performance, and he was every inch the movie star.
In any given decade, one or two musicians discovers exactly the right sound, look, and vibe to capture the spirit of the times. Such “triple-threat” artists are rare. Elvis Presley was one. David Bowie was another.
For many in my generation of kids growing up in the early 1980s, there were two such figures. One was Madonna. The other was Billy Idol. Unless you were a teenager in that dark, troubled time, you can’t imagine what a huge impact Idol had on youth culture. Let’s start with his look, an ingenious mix of pre-Goth romanticism (complete with black leather and rosary beads) and science-fiction cyberpunk (he had the same peroxide blond hair and chiseled features as Rutger Hauer’s Nazi replicant in Blade Runner).
Idol looked like…well…an idol. A pop idol, that is. But it was his sound that really mattered. Just as Elvis took the energy and soul of R&B and turned into something that middle-class, white American kids could enjoy, Idol took the punk sound of 1970s London and turned it into kick-ass American hard rock. His early hits like “White Wedding” and “Mony, Mony” stuck out a mile on FM radio (not to mention MTV, where they stuck out two miles). Not only were his songs vicious and fast, they had an actual beat; you could dance to them. And we did.
In short, Idol did what the Sex Pistols never could: he brought punk to mainstream America.
Back in the early 1980s when I was in high school, Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics played the annual Halloween Festival Concert at the U.F. Bandshell. I didn’t go, but some of my friends did, and word quickly spread that Williams and the band had played a great set. Also, apparently, Williams bared her breasts, as she was wont to do in concert. In fact, I heard that she had come on-stage wearing nothing on her upper half except a heavy coating of whipped cream (which quickly slid off).
Ahhh, punk rock.
Sadly, Williams’s life ended tragically when she committed suicide in 1998. She battled depression throughout her life, and it finally caught her. Which really sucks, because she sounded like an amazing person. Also, I think she would have had a comeback, at some point. She and the Plasmatics made some incredible music. My favorite of their songs is this one, “Masterplan.”
Ash Clifton, Writer 