Today at my temp job I read an article about Nirvana's smash record Nevermind and how soon it will be the 20th anniversary of its release. The article took me back to 1991 - the start of teenage angst. I was still in junior high when the album came out - just discovering The Beatles and at the same time studying all of these rich classical composers because I was just starting to get really good at piano. I don't really remember knowing much about Kurt Cobain until say my last year of high school, which was, sadly, two years after he died. And the only reason I really ever thought about him was because the summer before my senior year I had been living in Iowa City - a college town - and found a kickass pair of vintage Levi's courdory bell-bottoms and these two grungy girls who were sophomores thought they were cool while my own contemporaries thought I was an idiot and pretty weird. But I digress. The main article referenced all of the pop culture from that era that stemmed from a post-Reagan hatred by America's youth. I'm not savvy enough right now to go into details, but it referenced Beavis and Butthead and the MTV cartoon Daria as well as Ghost World (which was a little bit later, I think, though not sure). One of the items the article mentioned was the Grunge movement itself and how it made "thrifting" stylish; in fact, major designers like Marc Jacobs actually designed Grunge-inspired lines a few years later - I remember owning a Harpers' Bazaar issue that highlighted the fashion show and thinking how cool it was! In this article, it also mentioned how Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain probably HATED the clothes because they were just replicas of stuff they had found at thrift stores - and mainly bought previous to their success because they couldn't afford anything else. They referenced a website: www.thestylerookie.com and of course, because I was temping and didn't have anything better to do, I looked it up.
So here's what I found. Some freshman or sophomore high school student has this blog. She writes every few days or weeks or whatever and she has crazy adventures that are highlighted with her choosing outfits that match the theme of the blog. Then she takes a picture of herself in the clothes - a lot of which are thrifted or gifted. In the blog, there are great collage photographs and pictures of cultural references - pictures from movies like Heathers and Pretty In Pink. She is clearly fascinated by an era before her time, but I don't blame her. It was so much fun going back into the life of a teenage girl - her blog about having a slumber party with her friend and reading aloud from "Are you there God, It's Me, Margaret" and sharing tiaras. Reading this as an adult, I felt a little silly and guilty at the same time and a little annoyed at how precocious she and . . . of course, jealous.
I suppose I was jealous for two reasons. One, this girl - whose name I either forgot or isn't mentioned anywhere in the blog - appears to live in Chicago where there are enough people who don't care to be silly and teenage. I grew up in a town of 1,500 people where everything you do sticks out. Secondly, her sheer unadulterated and unconcerned creativity made me miss my own from that period.
There was once a time when I spent summers watching soap operas and reading my dad's college textbooks. I listened to the song "Hey Jude" over and over again because I had a crush on a boy with the same name (five years my senior I might add - I was sophisticated like that!). I had AWESOME creative art projects - like making book covers with collages from magazines and collected scraps on them.to put on my FAVORITE books. I made my own notebooks from scrap-paper and vintage wrapping paper I found or new wrapping paper I bought. I LOVED cutting off my jeans into shorts and wearing tights underneath with combat boots I was supposed to wear for Civil Air Patrol
I wrote ridiculous letters to boys I liked - mostly from nerd camp because they were the only ones I related to. Sometimes I sent them, sometimes I didn't.Whole afternoons were sometimes spent just digging around our basement looking for weird stuff of my parents or old pieces from toys that I could use for something I was going to make. When I got old enough to drive, I would spend entire days at my best friend's house watching some curious movie like "The Birds" and rummaging through shit in her basement. We did the most amusing things - like going to a mountain man rendezvous for our history class and then making a "professional quality" home movie on her dad's camcorder. Once, after a speech contest, a group of us hijacked the mime makeup, donned black clothes and walked around the mall, Target and a few coffeeshops not speaking and freaking people out. We didn't care - it was all in good fun.
Those years from 13 to 18 as horrid as they were on one hand, had to be the greatest on the other hand: mostly, because there was nothing to worry about. My parents would give me $20 (which bought a lot then) every now and then and it was enough to get some gas, some food and something dumb at the mall which I would most likely later regret buying,
Shortly after I started college, I discovered thrift store shopping and that just made life better. For example, I had a roommate I really didn't like that much my freshman year. She was a nice girl - I was just in a dark phase, so to freak her out I made a weird sculpture of old plywood and various-sized doll heads with toothpick cigarettes hanging out of her mouth. She would go out late and I would go to sleep, but leave the halogen lamp facing on the doll head sculpture - all particles begotten at the thrift store. I wrote ALL THE TIME - some of it nonsense, some of it good but CREATIVE all the same.
There's such a myriad of things in this whole time frame I could go into, but this isn't really a formalized writing so much as a little drafty thing (an essay in the works?) but this whole experience of reading this girl's blog got me wondering . . .
What happened to that creativity, I wonder? I used to just MAKE STUFF without thinking about it; I used to just WRITE stuff without thinking about it. I thought everything I did was great - and the funny thing is, a lot of it was - then I got mad at myself and threw it all away. I suppose you grow up and you assimilate. Things don't matter as much and perhaps you start to realize you're never going to be the best or people knock you down a few notches. - you start to look for a professionalism in your creativity - i.e. I pay too much attention to what my words mean in my songwriting; I worry that my knitting stitches aren't even. I also live with someone else, which I think has a lot to do with it. I don't have my own room and my boyfriend is a bit of a minimalist so all of that weird shit I used to collect - pictures from magazines, old fabric scraps, kids' ribbons I would find near the school bus stop - and used to put up on the walls for inspiration has taken the backseat for a meaningful relationship. Still, I'm inspired . . .
So I want to start writing on this blog more often - I want to read things and comment on them. I want to make things and take pictures. I want to come up with crazy outfits and share them with the world. I want to be self-important again like I was as a teenager (minus the arguing with my parents and snotty, arrogant attitude) and think my stuff is really COOL. I can't guarantee this will go on forever, but I'm going to try and see what happens - it might give me a purpose again to be uninhibited and push the edges, like a teenager with less acne. . . .
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