Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Before There Were Websites... (Pt 1)

...there were scrapbooks!

My parents are moving, abandoning my childhood home, and I spent my holiday going through old boxes in storage. It's hard to part with any of these secret keys to unlock my childhood. There's heaps and heaps of homemade comic books featuring my own superhero creations which I shan't share (because they were never optioned for movies... not because they are totally embarrassing. Uh, yeah. Not because of that). Plus lots and lots of drawings of various X-Men, Madonna, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker.

Many photo scrapbooks were uncovered including "MOVIES OF THE EIGHTIES"

front cover: Raging Bull (I hadn't seen it. I just knew it was
"important" somehow), E.T. and Aliens

Turns out The Film Experience was no fluke. I was always writing about movies... but when I was in junior high and high school, the writing was in list-making form and smelled like rubber cement instead of Apple computer.

inside covers: Silkwood , Crimes of Passion, Terms of Endearment

The front and back covers are completely mainstream / boy friendly, and yet the inside jackets are so actressexual. It's as if my love for actresses was still reasonably contained, with Meryl Streep and Kathleen Turner whispering to me in pupa stage.

I was absolutely obsessed with the unseen-by-me Crimes of Passion (MPAA ratings scandal!) though I'm not sure I ever asked myself why... Kathleen Turner was enough cover for and emblem of any prurient reason.

back cover: the infamous gold bikini, Return of the Jedi

Somewhere -- I cannot find it! -- there is a half-formed MOVIES OF THE NINETIES scrapbook which I began in college... but abandoned once the glorious internet took over my life and made scrapbooks actual items of nostalgia rather than just containers for the same.

Part 2 coming soon. some random funny clippings from the book.

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