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de1c914
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"You're innocent until proven guilty," Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones... but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be... maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. "We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed." The 1960's and 1970's were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend's house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn't exist... she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn't fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought... she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles... she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other... the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now. Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light."
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earth
grief
loss
death
convenient
old-school
reporter
taxi
retro
cape-breton
nova-scotia
stuck
moving
digital
medications
leaving-home
environment
canada
cars
stop
crying
gone
misery
trapped
lonely
sad
crazy
insane
dying
mental-illness
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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99c5c19
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"I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly... they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them... if I were you I would stop smoking them." "Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes," Mandy pointed out. "Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties... for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes... but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you," Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea."
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grief
loss
depression
past
education
cigar
blast-from-the-past
chain-smoke
no-smoking
vhs-tape
retro
depress
deadly
times
disturbing
smog
haunting
gray
cancer
spooky
video
creepy
smoke
cigarette
tobacco
pollution
attack
health
eerie
scary
sick
knowledge
trapped
self-help
horror
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Rebecca McNutt |
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5dc8a7b
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"Every day it's something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they'll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples' minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck," Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. "Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone."
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led-lights
microchips
retro
nanotechnology
telephone
digital
obsolete
sinister
minds
film
technology
mental-illness
memory
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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8235210
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"I think we ought to find something else to do," said Mandy. "But Alecto my love, you're the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project." "I like it. It's got that let's-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance," Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed."
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funny
friendship
love
ambience
better-days
fifties
retro
cape-breton
nova-scotia
diner
drowning
pollution
art
parents
kitchen
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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bf81d56
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Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.
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photography
integrity
future
future-shock
home-movies
kodak
projector
retro
super-8
vintage
popcorn
digital
lonliness
movies
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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068ac97
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The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960's of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother's hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father's denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.
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photography
poverty
arents
coal-mine
darkroom
kodachrome
print
retro
dancing
coal
canada
memory
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |