Eternally seeking a nice chat, she sallies forth in a chariot drawn by golden llamas.
It was just cool hair. We didn’t realize at the time that it would one day be 80s hair.
Cool hair was just cool hair. It was a strange thing about the 80s that we didn’t expect fashion to be different in the future. As we saw it, we were the future, and fashion would only get more 80s as time went on. Think of Sean Young in Blade Runner: those outfits are 1940s on the surface, but the interpretation is exaggerated 80s. Because that’s what we expected–progress, but in more or less the same direction. Our style was the ultimate, the most glamorous, the pinnacle of fashion toward which humankind had been striving for thousands of years. Any great change must have been retrograde. (Which, come to think of it, the 90s kind of were, but I tend to see them now as less backsliding and more retreating from the edge of a cliff.)
You can find examples of 80s hair in movies and magazines, but for the real thing as the common folk wore it, what you want is a high school yearbook from 1988 or so. That’s where you’ll find the giant pouf bangs, the teased perms, the gravity-defying, AquaNet-supported marvels that put 60s back-combing to shame and wrung tears of envy from the wistful ghost of Marie Antoinette.
You too* can achieve these heights–and widths–by following a few easy several fairly labor-intensive steps. So grab your round brush and get ready to ROCK. Here we go.
That’s all! I guess it didn’t seem like much at the time, but when I look back now I can’t believe how much time we spent getting our hair big. And I didn’t even get into crimping.
I didn’t do the long hair thing past freshman year, but I can’t claim it was because I was too cool. It was because I got a lopsided bob to go with my (for some reason) mismatched earrings. While I didn’t do pouf bangs after that one year, I DID spray and scrunch for maximum volume. To my adolescent eyes it looked a bit French. I was taking French at the time and I was very into my idea of France–a shadowy, vaguely Bohemian, entirely American vision constructed from fashion magazines, post-Impressionist paintings, biographies of poets, and Lost Generation novels.
Around 1990, people began to show up at school with mushroom cuts instead of feathers. The 90s heroin-chic waif look came creeping in, and here and there you can see smaller hair in a snapshot here and there. But that’s another story.
* I’m a bit embarrassed that this particular article will be helpful only to those with European-style hair (and very bad taste), but I don’t have the experience, or the arrogance, to start telling women of color how to do their hair (or the sense to recommend that the 80s be forgotten forever). Back to the list.
Yeah, this is me. I got that haircut ON PURPOSE.
** If you’re about to tell me that you liked both Poison and R.E.M., you were probably a band nerd and played by different rules anyway. If you liked both and were not a band nerd, well, there’s nothing much I can do about your lack of commitment. Sure, Laurie, whatever.
*** I think to critics the term New Wave still applied mostly to bands like the Talking Heads, but at my school it meant a sort of proto-goth. If you were New Wave, you liked The Cure and Siouxsie. I understand now.
**** I highly recommend Aussie products for the full experience. A bottle of Sprunch is like a little purple TARDIS, bursting with a sweet fruity scent that’s guaranteed to transport you back in time to the second row of a George Michael concert (rest his soul). I gotta have faith.
I think I’m backlashing against the term “storytelling,” which doesn’t mean I don’t want to watch that Neil Gaiman Master Class, because I totally do. But I feel like the word storytelling is being used irresponsibly. It’s being tossed around in all kinds of weather until it’s fixing to die of overexposure, if the marketers don’t flog it to death first.
My thoughts on the subject are not entirely connected. So: a list.
1. Storytelling and writing are not the same thing, and I’m a little impatient at how fans of the former like to diss the latter. You know, “I don’t care if it’s badly written just so it’s a good story.” I do care. Words matter. In the case of visual storytelling, images matter, and sequence is important.
2. Spoilers are not tragedies, because if all a story has to offer is surprise, what is EVEN the point, unless it’s a horror novel or movie? I knew Hamlet was going to die and it didn’t spoil the play.
3. People who get magical and mystical about storytelling make me suspicious. Old men with twinkly eyes and white beards who call themselves storytellers are charlatans to the bone. Children recognize this immediately.
3a. Joseph Campbell was a pompous old Texas Sharpshooter, bless his heart.
4. It’s appalling how the word has been co-opted by marketing. It was a good idea ten years ago, but now people slap “story” all over everything without including any actual narrative elements or really understanding what a story is. When you use a term too often, it becomes meaningless.
Let’s look at a semi-spam email I got from a startup.
This content tells a visual story about how to protect luxury brands in retail. It was produced in the Ceros platform and published in real time without any coding or dev work.
STFU. For real.
I guess you could make a story of protecting luxury brands. You know if you were protecting them from aliens, or, I don’t know, maybe a rival designer who was trying to steal credit for your work. You could get all avant-garde and non-linear with it (judiciously, please), or you could even be satirical about “luxury” for all I care, but visual storytelling = / = adding random pictures of phones and handbags. If you’re going to call it a story, make it a damn story. I’m losing it here.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this trip through Laurie’s mind. ADHD is a hell of a disease. Have a nice day.
Read MoreDysregulated
I am outline
This pressure-out is nearly as big as my skin
There is no room for sympathy between.
I am the aura
And not the core
I am a translucent edge
As seen with scam X-ray glasses from a comic book ad
I live here, in this outer red shift
Forced radial by energy felt as mass
She cannot regulate her emotions
(said some sleek doctor)
Her nerves are too close to the surface
(said my grandmother, who was a psychiatric nurse)
My nerves are a spring-steel coil
Snapping restraints in an urgent leap for circumference
I am trying to tell you, all you real people,
That my skin is strung over this moment right now
Over motion more resistant than matter
And I envy you your fine and personal skeletons.
Read More
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